SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it had found that an operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on thousands of U.S. ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May. 
 
 Facebook, the dominant social media network, said 3,000 ads and 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights. 
 
 Another $50,000 was spent on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads, likely by Russians, Facebook said. 
 
 U.S. election law bars foreign nationals and foreign entities from spending money to expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate. Non-U.S. citizens may generally advertise on issues. Other ads, such as those that mention a candidate but do not call for the candidate’s election or defeat, fall into what lawyers have called a legal gray area. 
 
 Facebook announced the findings in a blog post by its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and said that it was cooperating with federal inquiries into influence operations during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 
 
 Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees on Wednesday about the suspected Russia advertising, according to a congressional source familiar with the matter. Both committees are conducting probes into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, including potential collusion between the campaign of President Donald Trump and Moscow. 
 
 Facebook also gave its findings to Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, a source familiar with the matter said. The company produced copies of advertisements as well as data about the buyers, the source said. 
 
 Mueller’s office declined to comment. 
 
 Facebook said it found no link between the Russian-purchased advertising and any specific presidential campaign. The ads were mostly national in their focus and did not appear to reflect targeting of political swing-states, the company said. 
 
 Even if no laws were violated, Facebook said the 470 accounts and pages associated with the ads ran afoul of the social network’s requirements for authenticity and have since been suspended. 
 
 Facebook did not print the names of any of the suspended pages, but some of them included such words as “refugee” and “patriot.” 
 
 More than $1 billion was spent on political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, thousands of times more than the presumed Russian spending identified by Facebook’s security team. 
 
 FILE PHOTO - A 3D plastic representation of the Facebook logo is seen in this illustration photo May 13, 2015. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo 
 
 But the findings buttress U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Russia was actively involved in shaping the election. 
 
 Facebook previously published a white paper on influence operations, including what it said were fake “amplifier” accounts for propaganda, and said it was cracking down. 
 
 As recently as June, Facebook told journalists that it had not found any evidence of Russian operatives buying election-related ads on its platform. 
 
 “TROLL FACTORY” CONNECTION 
 
 Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the Facebook report “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence community.” 
 
 “We are keenly interested in Russia’s use of social media platforms, both the use of bots and trolls to spread disinformation and propaganda, including through the use of paid online advertising,” he said in a statement. 
 
 A Facebook employee said Wednesday that there were unspecified connections between the divisive issue ads and a well-known Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg that publishes comments on social media. 
 
 Ellen Weintraub, a member of the U.S. Federal Election Commission, said U.S. voters deserve to know where the ads are coming from and that the money behind them is legal. 
 
 “It is unlawful for foreign nationals to be spending money in connection with any federal, state or local election, directly or indirectly,” Weintraub said in a phone interview. 
 
 She declined to comment on the Facebook ads, saying she could not discuss subjects that could come before the agency. 
 
 Facebook declined to release the ads themselves, prompting a sharp rebuke on Twitter from Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of First Look Media, a producer of feature and documentary films, television and podcasts. 
 
 “Facebook keeps the targeted political ads it publishes secret, emboldening criminals,” wrote Omidyar, the eBay founder who also provided funding to launch media organization The Intercept. “I don’t see how that can possibly be legal.” 
 
 The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau 
 
 Facebook’s disclosure may be the first time a private entity has pointed to receiving Russian money related to U.S. elections, said Brendan Fischer, a program director at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for more transparency. 
 
 “Whoever may have provided assistance to Russia in buying these Facebook ads is very likely in violation of the law,” he said, adding that Facebook has a legal duty to act if it is aware of similar activity in the future. ||||| Facebook says likely Russia-based group paid for political ads during US election 
 
 Facebook said on Wednesday it had found that an influence operation probably based in Russia spent $100,000 on ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May. 
 
 The social media network said that many of the ads promoted 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages Facebook has now suspended. The ads spread polarizing views on topics such as immigration, race and gay rights, instead of backing a particular political candidate, it said. 
 
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 Facebook announced the findings in a blogpost by its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and said that it was cooperating with federal inquiries into influence operations during the 2016 presidential election. 
 
 The company said it found no link to any presidential campaign. Three-quarters of the ads were national in scope, and the rest did not appear to reflect targeting of political swing states as voting neared. 
 
 Facebook did not print the names of any of the suspended pages, but some of them included such words as “refugee” and “patriot”. 
 
 The findings buttress US intelligence agency conclusions that Russia was actively involved in shaping the election. 
 
 Facebook previously published a white paper detailing well-funded and subtle techniques used by countries and organizations to spread misleading information for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond “fake news”, the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion. 
 
 The company said in April: “We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people.” 
 
 Facebook did not attribute the manipulation to any nation state, although it said that the company’s investigation “does not contradict” the findings of a January report by the US director of national intelligence that outlined Russian involvement in the election. 
 
 Even so, as recently as June, it told journalists that it had not found any evidence to date of Russian operatives buying election-related ads on its platform. 
 
 A Facebook employee said on Wednesday there were unspecified connections between the divisive ads and a well-known Russian “troll factory” in St Petersburg that publishes comments on social media. 
 
 Beyond the issue ads, Facebook said it uncovered $50,000 more in overtly political advertising that might have links to Russia. Some of those ads were bought using the Russian language, even though they were displayed to users in English. 
 
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 Even if no laws were violated, the pages ran afoul of Facebook requirements for authenticity, setting up the suspensions. 
 
 “In the past Facebook has taken the stance that it’s a tech company and not a media company, but they have clearly moved into the media company category,” said advertising veteran Mike Kelly, CEO of Kelly Newman Ventures and former president of AOL Media. “They have to up their game a bit.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Zuckerberg has said the idea that fake news on Facebook could influence an election is ‘pretty crazy’, but not everyone agrees. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images 
 
 Kelly suggests that the company should use its technology prowess to come up with “new ways to filter and assess accounts and advertisers”. 
 
 
 
 Facebook, which now has 2 billion monthly users, suspends more than 1 million accounts per day in its quest to keep spam, fraud and hate speech of its platform. 
 
 
 
 More than $1bn was spent on digital political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, 10,000 times the amount identified by Facebook’s security team. 
 
 Facebook has rejected the notion that fake news on Facebook influenced the outcome of the US election, with Mark Zuckerberg describing it as a “pretty crazy idea”. 
 
 “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said in November. 
 
 But Facebook’s ad sales team tells a different story. It highlights how an “audience-specific” political campaign on Facebook was able to “significantly shift voter intent and increase favorability” for US senate candidate Pat Toomey, contributing to his re-election. 
 
 In other words: it is entirely possible to swing an election using Facebook advertising, but it doesn’t seem like this Russian “influence operation” was effective. 
 
 “Maybe nothing happened this time, but it’s a good warning to them that their [Facebook’s] role in the media landscape has changed, especially given their scale, and with that comes a lot of new responsibility,” said Kelly. ||||| Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company's findings. 
 
 Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian "troll farm" with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said. 
 
 A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said, although they declined to say which candidate the ads favored. 
 
 Most of the ads, according to a blog post published late Wednesday by Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, "appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights." 
 
 The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign. 
 
 The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help elect Trump, including by using paid social media trolls to spread fake news intended to influence public opinion. 
 
 Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months. 
 
 Facebook reported in its blog post Wednesday that about one-quarter of the ads in question were "geographically targeted," although company officials declined to provide specifics about what areas or demographic groups were the recipients. Of those targeted ads, the company said, more ran in 2015 than 2016. 
 
 Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that the disclosure by Facebook confirmed one of the ways Russia sought to interfere in U.S. politics and serves as a "profound warning to us and others about future elections." 
 
 "This is a very significant set of data points produced by Facebook," Schiff said, adding: "Left unanswered in what we received from Facebook — because it is beyond the scope of what they are able to determine — is whether there was any coordination between these social media trolls and the campaign. We have to get to the bottom of that." 
 
 The House panel, whose staff investigators heard briefly from Facebook representatives behind closed doors Wednesday, will follow up with Facebook and other social media companies and platforms to see "to what degree they are able to confirm similar metrics," Sciff said. 
 
 An official familiar with Facebook's internal investigation said the company does not have the ability to determine whether the ads it sold represented any sort of coordination. 
 
 The acknowledgment by Facebook follows months of criticism that the social media company served as a platform for the spread of false information before the November election. In a statement posted days after the election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to explore the issue but said that 99 percent of information found on Facebook is authentic and only "a very small amount" is fake or hoaxes. In December, however, the company announced that it would begin flagging articles that had been deemed false or fake, with the assistance of fact-checking organizations. 
 
 Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company. 
 
 Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads. 
 
 A Facebook official said "there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm." The official declined to release any of the ads it traced to Russian companies or entities. 
 
 "Our data policy and federal law limit our ability to share user data and content, so we won't be releasing any ads," the official said. The official added that the ads "were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment and immigration." 
 
 Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has studied Russian online influence campaigns, said Wednesday that Facebook's report served as "validation" for findings by him and his researchers, who he said had spotted what they believed to be Russians posing as Americans to press political messages on Facebook as early as 2015. 
 
 He said his analysis showed that Facebook ads in 2015 were largely concerned with divisive social messages and were used to identify other Facebook users most susceptible to messaging. Those users were then targeted with election-oriented ads in 2016, he said. 
 
 "We had these suspicions, but we could never see who was purchasing the accounts," said Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "Facebook's being brave. They probably could have buried this, and they did the right thing by coming forward." 
 
 Stamos, the Facebook security chief, said the company is committed to continuing to protect the integrity of its site and improve its ability to track fraudulent accounts. He said Facebook has shut down the accounts that remained active. 
 
 "We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform," he said. 
 
 This year, Facebook announced technology improvements to detect fake accounts and more recently announced that it would no longer allow Facebook pages to advertise if they have a pattern of sharing false news stories. Over the past few months, Stamos said, the company has also taken action to block fake accounts tied to election meddling in France and Germany. 
 
 The Internet Research Agency has received attention in the past for its activity. 
 
 In 2013, hackers released internal company documents showing it employed 600 people across Russia. Ex-employees who have gone public with their experiences at the company in Internet postings and in media interviews have said their work entailed creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts and using them to circulate pro-Kremlin propaganda. They said Internet Research Agency employees, for instance, spread derogatory information about Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in the days after his 2015 murder. 
 
 In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched social media campaigns in the United States, including a sophisticated hoax that spread false news of a chemical leak in Louisiana in 2014, apparently to sow chaos and fear. 
 
 In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency's "likely financier" is a "close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence." 
 
 In May, Time magazine reported that U.S. intelligence officials had discovered evidence that Russian agents had purchased ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. A Facebook spokesman told the magazine that the company had no evidence of such buys. 
 
 Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election. 
 
 Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC. (Permanent residents who hold green cards, however, are not considered foreign nationals.) Violators face civil penalties, as well as criminal prosecution, if they are found to have knowingly broken the law. 
 
 Andrew Roth, Alice Crites, Matea Gold and Ashley Parker contributed to this report.
– Facebook says a Russian "troll farm" appears to have spent $100,000 on 3,300 digital ads targeting American voters in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, the Washington Post reports. While some of the ads expressly mentioned Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the majority simply promoted "divisive" views on things like gun and gay rights, discrimination, and immigration. According to Reuters, the ads were linked to 470 "inauthentic" accounts and pages that have since been suspended. While Facebook isn't releasing the ads, the names of the suspended pages featured words like "patriot" and "refugee," the Guardian reports. The Russian company linked to the ads has a history of spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. Facebook said it also found $50,000 spent on 2,200 "potentially politically related" ads that may be tied to Russia. The company's findings are more evidence to back the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that Russia influenced the election. The findings are also likely to make investigators question whether the Russians were getting input on ad buys from people in the US. The ad buys may have been a violation of US election law by Facebook and others involved. “It is unlawful for foreign nationals to be spending money in connection with any federal, state, or local election, directly or indirectly,” a member of the US Federal Election Commission tells Reuters. Facebook found no evidence tying the ads to any presidential campaign.