Before there were reasons to go after Facebook for taking money from Russian entities to influence the 2016 presidential election, there was ISIS using the social media monster to spread propaganda. In 2015, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and Sen. Diane Feinstein were fighting with Facebook, trying to force the company to report suspected terrorist activity to the committee. At the time -- as Sen. Burr put it -- "they told us to pound sand". The reason? Facebook said that giving up that information would infringe on the privacy and free speech rights of Facebook users.
Facebook, Trump, Russian officials 'working' together
Executives from the social media company used a similar reason last week for why they refused to hand over ads that Russian entities paid Facebook for during the 2016 presidential campaign. On Wednesday of last week, on the same day that Facebook publicly acknowledged that Russians bought ads on Facebook to promote fake news stories and manipulate public opinion, they flaunted their privacy policy at congressional investigators. Those congressional investigators had been trying to get Facebook executives to hand over those ads for months before company officials gave them to special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team on the same day.
All investigators involved were specifically interested in the wording in those ads to find out if Russians sided with one candidate over the other, or if they revealed any preference.
This would give credence to the view that a foreign entity had violated federal election law along with their attempt to influence the election outcome. But there is also the matter of operatives in the U.S. who had to help make sure ads targeted the right people in the right districts. That role would have fallen on the director of Trump's digital campaign, Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner, who hired Parscale's firm to handle digital ads.
Facebook's suspicious denials, fake news surge
Facebook staff would have certainly worked side by side with the Trump campaign and, therefore, with Russian operatives. But up until their official acknowledgment, the company repeatedly denied that Russian sources had been buying Facebook ads at all. They still denied it in April when Facebook officials released a white paper titled: "Facebook and information operations."
In that paper, its authors talked about how the company was broadening their security focus on more "subtle and insidious forms of misuse" as opposed to standard spam, malware, hacking, and financial scams.
It's been reported that those ads might have reached an estimated 70 million Americans. Mueller has reportedly increased his investigative lens on Facebook as an extension of his criminal probe.
It appears that the company's white paper, in general, acknowledges the findings of those reports without directly admitting to it. Also to clarify, the fake news was already created by people who were anti-Clinton such as pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli who said in August of last year that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's. Following that, there were also stories about Clinton's aides running a pedophile ring at a D.C. pizza restaurant and other stories about a DNC staffer who was murdered. Anyone who was aware of those stories would have noticed a surge of their presence in the media.