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Details of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads have been reviewed by the media. The investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 US presidential election... Russian-Bought Facebook Ads Released To Journalists

Details of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads have been reviewed by the media.

The investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 US presidential election is still underway. After a year’s time, dozens of indictments have been handed down while speculation about who will be the next to go runs rampant. Of those indictments, at least thirteen are Russian operatives from the Internet Research Agency, largely due to interference through Facebook ads.

Quite some time ago, Facebook was asked to explain itself as to why political ads that were paid for in rubles never raised any red flags within the company. Now, the content of more than 3,000 ads has been released to the news media, and some journalists set themselves to the task of viewing every single one of them.

“USA TODAY NETWORK reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post,” the outlet stated.

Disappointing news

As USAToday reports, there was a wide variety of topics to the ads. However, one single issue plays out in more ads than any other, and that is racial divide and fostering racial tensions. That should come as no surprise since the outgoing President Barack Obama was despised by a cluster of the population for being an African-American. Sadly, the ads continued to distribute racial divisiveness even after the outcome of the election had been declared and President Obama was no longer the key figure he had been.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was recently called to testify before Congress about privacy violations associated with selling data to third-parties, and has already been called to speak before Parliament about the matter. However, there remains no satisfactory answer as to why the company allowed this kind of foreign interference and hate mongering.