Facebook, Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has hinted that Russia might have interfered in Brexit. The company had given a different stance earlier outlining that there had been no substantive evidence of any Kremlin interference, but is now changing its tune.
A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying, “To date, we have not observed that the known, coordinated clusters in Russia engaged in significant coordination of ad buys or political misinformation targeting the Brexit vote.”
It was in September that the company moved ahead to reveal that it had come across a number of Russian accounts with expenditures of about $100,000 in ads. Over 3,000 accounts were identified. Facebook said that the country might have influenced the outcome in the U.S. election though these ads, a matter that has caused much uproar among top government officials. Facebook revealed that the ads had been seen by almost 10 million users but eventually took that number higher to the much more significant 126 million.
Facebook only recently testified to Congress regarding the alleged Russian misuse of its platform. Since the elections, Facebook, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) have been in the spotlight for dissemination of so-called “fake news” said to have impacted the recent presidential elections. More information is being unveiled and Twitter has come forward to state that it came across about 200 accounts related to Russian bot network/factors.
These companies have in the course of time been battling PR damage from these incidents. On top of that they have been struggling with immense pressure emanating from the governments of countries including Germany, France and Britain. All of them have been pressuring the social media giants to do all within their means to curb the menace of what they call fake news as well as the wide range of alleged extremist activities on the platforms.
Theresa May, the British Prime Minister recently moved ahead to give a strong speech at the lord mayor’s banquet and it was clear to all that she was sending a message to Vladimir Putin, relating to these matters.
