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There’s more beyond that. Facebook also deleted over 170 Russia-linked Instagram accounts that had made about 120,000 posts, and it had discovered security threats against politicians that stemmed from APT28, the hacking team regularly connected to Russian military intelligence.
Facebook was quick to downplay the volume of Russian posts in its testimony. There were over 11 trillion total posts from Pages on Facebook between 2015 and 2017, the company said. And it’s true that merely seeing a post doesn’t mean you notice it, let alone that you believe what it says. However, that doesn’t change that a significant portion of those 126 million people interacted with those posts. That’s millions of people who unwittingly played a part in what appears to be a massive Russian disinformation campaign.
The company certainly isn’t alone when Google and Twitter have also found evidence of meddling. This is a broader problem with how underprepared internet companies were to deal with such a broad attempt to influence the American public. However, Facebook doesn’t look good in light of this testimony: it had initially claimed that its content didn’t influence the election at all, and now it’s admitting that Russian operators were wildly successful in sowing chaos (even if only some people fell for the ploy). The company’s rush to fix its ad system before the 2018 mid-terms just took on an added sense of urgency.
