U.S. Senator says Russia paid for its pro-Trump Facebook ads in rubles
Last week, Facebook finally acknowledged what it had long been denying: Russia used fake accounts to run paid ads on Facebook with the intention of getting Donald Trump elected. The ads didn’t mention Trump by name, but they advocated for his key political issues. Now comes another stunning revelation: the Russians paid for their Facebook ads in rubles.
This news came by way of Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the Trump-Russia scandal. On Thursday night he linked to a CBS News report about the Russian Facebook ads, adding “And they paid in RUBLES. Seriously.” (link). Warner’s implication is clear: he believes that Facebook was overly lax in allowing these ads to have been booked, as the payment in foreign currency should have been a red flag that the accounts in question may not have belonged to U.S. citizens. So what next?
Based on Senator Warner’s indignation, and the largely bipartisan nature of the Senate Intel Committee’s Trump-Russia probe, it’s nearly a given that the committee will now target Facebook itself in an attempt to get to the bottom of the matter. Facebook says it’s fully cooperating with the committee. That suggests we’ll see Facebook employees, perhaps including Mark Zuckerberg, brought in to testify about the ads. Warner has also previously asserted that the six figure ad buy disclosed by Facebook is just the “tip of the iceberg” and that there’s much more coming.
Facebook is largely run by algorithms, so it’s possible that no human employees had any involvement with the Russian ad buy. If that’s the case, Facebook will be taken to task for a lack of human oversight of its automated operations. In addition, Facebook may be asked to explain why it sent its employees to Donald Trump’s campaign offices to help the campaign with its Facebook advertising strategy (link). There’s much more to come on this story.
