Google revealed Russian ads on Gmail, Facebook and YouTube Spreading Disinformation
Google has unveiled for the first time since Trump’s regime was started, the search engine giant claims that they have found concrete evidence for the involvement of Russian agents in 2016 election campaigns.
Google has found tens of thousands of dollars were poured into the ad campaigns using the platforms like YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, DoubleClick ad network and others to spread disinformation before the 2016 elections by Russian agents.
A month ago Google’s spokesperson Andrea Faville told Washington post that “The Company is always in monitoring for abusive content and violations of the policies and we haven’t seen any campaign running on our sites breaching the policies”.
Although, Google started probing into the matter as a result of mounting pressure from the Congress, which ordered tech companies to investigate how Russian operatives used social media and advertising platforms to influence 2016 presidential elections which created unrest among U.S. society.
However, Google denied commenting on the story. Until today, Google kept it aside from involving in investigative matters and providing comment on the stories being published in various newspapers. Facebook, on the other hand, has shared 3,000 Russian-purchased ads with investigators in the Congress. The purchase of ads was done by the Internet Research Agency and Russian-government affiliated troll farm, said Facebook.
The ads ran during the presidential campaigns aimed at creating division in the United States by adding an anti-immigrant sentiment and racial animosity. According to Facebook, those ads reached 10 million people of 210 million US users only who logged in each month on the platform.
Facebook has said in a blog post that an additional 2200 ads they are investigating which may not have come from the Internet Research Agency.
Twitter said that it has removed the 201 accounts that were associated with the Internet Research Agency. Twitter said $274,100 were spent on the platform in 2016 company linked to Kremlin, but Twitter did not mention how many times the campaigns were run and shared the information.
Google finally discovered this Russian involvement on the platforms by siphoning data from other tech company and Twitter. Twitter allows access to a few historical tweets to outsiders for free and charges developers to access data stemming back to 2006.
Google accessed data from Twitter and trace back the Russian Twitter accounts that used Google’s services to buy ads, people said.
Google’s investigation is still in early stages, the total number of ads posted and clicked data is still to be discovered which is not easy or may not be done properly. Google continues to examine its records and sharing data with Facebook. However, Twitter and Google have not come to the decision to cooperate in their own investigations.
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