It is Facebook’s duty to share more information with the public about how Russia used social media ads to influence the 2016 election, argues Jim Rutenberg, a media columnist at the New York Times.
He is referring to Facebook’s recent revelation that a Kremlin-tied Russian firm was responsible for running thousands of political ads before, during and after the election — but Americans are still in the dark about what these ads looked like, what information or false news they spread, who or what the accounts pretended to be, or how many Americans interacted with the ads while they were running.
“There’s a stunning lack of public specificity about an alleged foreign campaign to influence our domestic politics,” Rutenberg writes. “The Russian effort was able to elude [paid media ad] laws through social media, where the system has clearly — and fundamentally — broken down.”
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