2016presidentialelection
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Facebook: Russian group spent $100,000 on ads during 2016 election
"Fake news" was one of the biggest buzzwords surrounding the hotly contested 2016 presidential election, with lots of attention focusing on Facebook's role as a platform for distributing misleading stories. After some reluctance, Facebook has slowly but surely taken steps to keep fake news distribution pages from finding a foothold, and today the company has revealed some data around how widespread the problem actually is. Chief security officer Alex Stamos said in a blog post that Facebook reviewed ad buys and discovered that about $100,000 in ad spend from June 2015 through May 2017 was connected to 470 "inauthentic" pages and accounts -- and it looks like the pages were both affiliated with each other and run out of Russia.
