Remarks

Facebook Is Still In Denial About Fake News

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is trying to tell Congress—and the American public—that its ads are not especially effective.

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By Max Chafkin

October 31, 2017 at 5:42 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This afternoon—after months of deflections and evasions and many paeans about the power of community—Facebook will attempt to explain itself to lawmakers. The company’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, will testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, along with executives from Twitter Inc. and Google Inc., about the scope of Kremlin-connected propaganda on the world’s largest social network.

Among other things, Stretch will say that the well-known Russian misinformation factory, the Internet Research Agency, managed to reach 126 million people, or about 40 percent of the American population, from 2015 to 2017, as part of its efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. Facebook had previously said the Kremlin-connected group had reached around 10 million people by spending $100,000 on ads.