More than half of Facebook pages that featured U.S. political ads failed to disclose who was behind them, NYU researchers found.
More than half of Facebook pages that displayed U.S. political ads during a recent 13-month period concealed the identities of their backers, according to research reviewed by POLITICO — a tide of deceptive messaging that raises new questions about the social network’s promises of transparency.
The stealth political ads were estimated to cost at least $37 million, equivalent to 6 percent of all the money spent on Facebook messages in the U.S. during the research period, from May 2018 until June 2019, according to estimates from New York University researchers.
The academics also found evidence that partisan groups across the political spectrum had created 16 clusters of inauthentic communities on the world’s largest social network that bought ads aimed at swaying potential voters, borrowing from tactics Russian operatives had employed during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Continue reading.