On Thursday, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released the 3,000 Facebook ads that Russia paid to run on the platform from 2015 through 2017, including those that were posted during the 2016 elections. In addition to the ads, which the IRA paid Facebook around $100,000 to run, the group published 80,000 other posts on the site, organically reaching an estimated 126 million Americans. House analysts noted the ads fit within a well-defined set of categories, all of which touch on the most divisive political topics of our time. The ads would also simultaneously bolster certain communities’ online presence on one hand, while encouraging detractors to attack that same community on the other. We are quite divided as a nation.”The full 7.9 gigabytes of ads can be downloaded here, via the Democrats’ House Intelligence Committee website.

Source: Huffington Post May 10, 2018 21:11 UTC