Facebook Might Have Given Trump 10 Million Votes, Russian Ad Response Inadequate

At this point, Facebook is no longer denying that it had a hand in putting Donald Trump in the White House. However, the social network recently revealed that it might have given the current POTUS up to 10 million votes by showing fake Russian ads. What’s more, Facebook’s answer to its fake ad problem does not seem to be adequate.

According to Facebook’s own admission, the social network showed over 3,000 ads bought and paid for by a Russian company, The Verge reports. Supposedly, only 44 percent of these ads were shown to the public before the elections, but it was still shown to more than 10 million users.

Now, it’s worth noting that there is no data on how many of those people saw the same ads or how many ads were shown to which people. It’s possible that the 10 million number could be made up of people who saw multiple ads, but without exact figures, it’s hard to tell.

These details were disclosed to Congress, where Facebook is in the middle of an investigation into the Russia-linked election tampering. The company’s officials also wanted to reassure the public that around a quarter of the ads were never shown.

In an effort to stamp out any chance of history repeating itself, Facebook just announced that it would be hiring an additional 1,000 people to review all ads that the social network will be showing. As Business Insider notes, however, this is simply not enough.

Simply throwing bodies at a problem does not address the core issue surrounding the social media giant. Adding more workers is exactly what it did when a string of suicide and violent videos started showing up on the Facebook Live platform, but the damage was already done.

In every major incident related to its service, Facebook has always been too late. In the case of the fake ads bought by Russia, Mark Zuckerberg and his team’s negligence doomed the US to four years of a Trump presidency.