Greigor The Fellhand
Member
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-russia-data-fake-accounts-2017-10
thanks Cameron:
backed up by WAPO
thanks Cameron:
backed up by WAPO
Facebook removed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 election by accounts linked to Russia after a Columbia University social media researcher, Jonathan Albright, used the company's data analytics tool to examine the reach of the Russian accounts.
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"Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing," he said.
Facebook confirmed that the posts had been removed, but said it was because the company had fixed a glitch in the analytics tool called CrowdTangle that Albright had used.
We identified and fixed a bug in CrowdTangle that allowed users to see cached information from inactive Facebook Pages, said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman.
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Albright, who discovered the content had reached a far broader audience than Facebook initially acknowledged, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the data had allowed him "to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle" of Russia's election interference.
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The other 464 accounts closed by Facebook have not yet been made public. If they are, an analysis of their combined posts would likely reveal that their content was shared an estimated billions of times during the election.