Facebook previously have gone on record to note, Russia's Internet Research Agency is associated with 470 Facebook accounts that were banned relating to the 2016 election, plus 270 more in Russia just in the prior week. But in today's FTC commission testimony Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) also mentioned a much higher estimate of quote "tens of thousands", however the confidence in this number would be also much lower.
“In the IRA specifically, the ones we’ve pegged back to the IRA, we can identify 470 in the American elections, and the 270 that we went after in Russia last week,” he began in response to Senator Feinstein (D-), who had asked about the numbers of accounts associated with this type of coordinated disinformation campaign.
But then he continued:
“There are many others that our systems catch which are more difficult to attribute specifically to Russian intelligence, but the number would be in the tens of thousands of fake accounts…”
The "tens of thousands" number should be taken with a grain of salt, since the company (Facebook) has not been able to prove more than the stated 740 or so to the IRA and Russian Intelligence. But it is still significant; the situation is clearly different from the approximately thirty thousand accounts banned in relation to France's election. That was a specific number and also not mentioned in association with Russia specifically, as this estimate was.
Facebook is clearly being conservative in its estimates of Russian-associated accounts, and that may be the responsible thing to do. But Mark Zuckerberg's comments today establish a ceiling in the "tens of thousands" and the floor of several hundred.
Image: Getty Images
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