Since the reports of Facebook's Russian ads were confirmed last week, many have been wondering about the issues congressional committees have faced to try and get the social media company to cooperate and what kind of pressure would need to be applied. According to an article by Bloomberg titled: "Mueller Probe Has ‘Red-Hot’ Focus on Social Media, Officials Say," an official who spoke on the conditions of anonymity confirmed that the special prosecutor's team was "zeroing in" on social media entities like Facebook and Twitter.
The official said that Mueller's team is interested in how external Russian sources spread fake news and more specifically, what happened on those networks.
These are efforts that congressional investigators have been trying for, but with no success. They had even less success in getting that information when Facebook turned over the data on those ads to Mueller last Wednesday, when the company admitted, in a blog post, that in fact, Russian sources bought those ads. It's currently unclear if committee investigators have the data as well.
As ranking member and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) is with one of several congressional committees involved in the investigation on President Trump's possible collusion with Russian officials, who interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Last Thursday, Sen.
Warner said that he hoped to get executives from various media companies -- including Facebook -- to publicly testify about the role those companies played in manipulating the race to the White House. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has expressed similar interest.
Facebook admits Russian ads
On Wednesday, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos published a blog post where he detailed the results of an internal review, saying that the social media company found $100,000 in ad spending which amounted to 3,000 ads that were associated with Russian entities outside of the U.S.
The company also said that $50,000 were spent on 2,200 "potentially politically related" ads.
He said that those ads were connected to 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages, all violating Facebook policies from sources that had operated out of Russia. In the blog post, Stamos referred to a white paper that was published in April about the company expanding their security focus from traditional abusive behavior "to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse." Stamos was referring to the manipulation of civil discourse and attempts to deceive people.
Mueller investigation interested in Facebook ads
In the white paper -- which was co-authored by Jen Weedon and William Nuland -- they said that the company wanted to be transparent about their approach to understanding the growing threats in social media and what they as a company intend to do about them. Being transparent about turning those ads over to congressional investigators however, was previously an entirely different matter altogether.
It was reported that in recent months, congressional investigators had met with Facebook executives and more recently last Wednesday, that they were shown samples of ads but the company refused to release those ads to the investigators. The details in those ads have been confirmed as being a "red-hot" point of interest, not just congressional investigators -- again, if they have them -- but for the team under special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Initially, Facebook executives had said that they would release the information under a subpoena, the equivalent of a gun to their heads. Since Mueller had convened a grand jury in July, it's likely that Facebook had no choice but to cooperate.
Facebook and Trump campaign denials
After months of denying that "Russian entities" had purchased Facebook ads, the social media giant's executives finally admitted to it last week. MSN's Rachel Maddow did a 20-minute segment about the Russian Facebook ads on Wednesday, where she chided the company for pushing back against multiple reports over the Russian ads. She said that journalists who reported on the possible federal election violation, would be very happy to find that they were right.
The intelligence community very well believes that social media has become "the soft underbelly of espionage."
Mark Warner met with Facebook officials in June when he said he was convinced that the company could tell investigators whether anyone from the Trump campaign helped boost fake news articles that targeted the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. The ads helped direct fake news articles to districts in key states that helped the Trump campaign gain leverage. One person of interest is said to be former Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale who is set to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee and has denied that he helped the Trump campaign boost those articles.