The House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday that it is ready to release a trove Russian-linked Facebook ads from the 2016 election season shortly after meeting with one of the company’s top executives.
Reps. Mike Conaway (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), leaders of the committee’s Russia probe, announced the decision following a meeting with Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
The House Intelligence Committee announcement ends an impasse between the social media giant and US lawmakers.
The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas (R) and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. after speaking with Facebook COO Sharyl Sandberg (Pic: Oct. 11, 2017)
Facebook COO Sharyl Sandberg (Pictured: April 2017) headed to Capital Hill before a scheduled hearing with America’s three largest tech companies on November 1
Facebook initially balked at the prospect of having to make the more than 3,000 ads they traced back to a Russian internet agency public, citing company privacy concerns.
During the closed door meeting, Sandberg told lawmakers that Facebook is working hard to ensure Americans ‘understand what the propaganda is that they may or may not be reading,’ Conway told reporters after their discussion.
Facebook initially balked at the prospect of having to make the more than 3,000 ads they traced back to Russia (Pictured: Facebook CEO Oct 2017)
Facebook said last month that the ads focused on divisive political messages, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights, and were seen by an estimated 10 million people.
The meeting came ahead of a Nov. 1 House Intelligence Committee hearing at which Facebook, Twitter and Google are expected to testify.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is also holding an open hearing with the three companies that day.
Sandberg held an additional meeting with Schiff, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
Sandberg said, according to Schiff, that Facebook is ‘determined to take whatever steps are necessary to ferret out foreign actors creating fake identities and using their platform.’
He said Sandberg also indicated the company wants the help of the intelligence community to identify who may be using Facebook for those reasons.
That’s a break from the Senate intelligence committee, which had said it won’t release them. Facebook has also declined to make the ads public.
The House Intelligence Committee is looking into whether the Russian government meddled in the 2016 presidential election (Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin October 2017)
‘My personal bias is that we’ll do that as quickly as we can,’ Conaway said, adding that they probably wouldn’t release the ads before the Nov. 1 hearings.
Both men said that in the end, voters need to be more aware of the type of information they are seeking out.
‘You and I as voters are responsible for where we get information and how we trust it, and whether we trust it,’ Conaway said.
A data mining and analysis company that worked on President Donald Trump’s campaign confirmed that it will also turn over information to the House intelligence committee to ‘provide it with information that might help its investigation’ on Thursday.
‘We believe that other organizations that worked on the campaign have been asked to do the same,’ Cambridge Analytica said in a statement, adding that there was no ‘suggestion of wrongdoing.’