Congress Releases 3,500 Russian Ads On Facebook, Targets Include Fox News Viewers And Minorities

Even though it’s been known for nearly two years now that Russia interfered with US elections using Facebook ads, it’s still jarring to see the reality of this fact by being given examples of the trend. This is the case when Congress released 3,500 Facebook ads that were paid for by the Russians, which showed that the targets varied from regular viewers of Fox News to members of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s been generally agreed upon that one of the mandates behind the Russian election interference was to sow as much division and chaos among voters running up to election day. This was done by fanning the ire of specific groups against others, of which fans of Fox News host Sean Hannity and those protesting against police brutality against minorities are quite the volatile examples, NBC News reports.

However, it would seem that the ad campaigns were carefully crafted to inflame groups just enough to give voters more reasons to be wary of then-candidate Hillary Clinton. Some of the issues that were brought up and used quite effectively by the $100,000 ad purchases include gun control, immigration, and Islam.

In several occasions, the issues can actually get quite specific, ranging from the serious to the silly. One example is how the Russians tried to put both pro and anti-Beyoncé people against one another, The Washington Post reports. Clearly, Russia saw that Americans had plenty of frustrations to work through and used this fact to push their own agenda.

The release of these ads come after Facebook executives had already made an appearance before Congress to give their testimonies and answer questions. One of the biggest concerns that lawmakers still had was how to prevent the same thing from happening again. The answer wasn’t encouraging as Facebook admits that a state-funded effort to destabilize the US could be beyond their capabilities to stop.