An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

Now he was in Menlo Park to confront Sandberg directly. The sofas, where Sandberg preferred to sit for meetings, were ignored, and the group sat formally at the conference table. Warner had brought his aides, and Sandberg had assembled her staff, as well as Stamos. It was clear that Warner had an agenda, and his questions for Sandberg and Stamos were pointed—he wanted to know what evidence Facebook had uncovered on Russia’s election interference.

Earlier that month, Time magazine had published a story that alleged that U.S. intelligence officials had evidence that Russia had purchased Facebook ads as a way of targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2016 presidential elections. Stamos and other members of the security team had read the piece with frustration. For months they had been searching for Russian ads, but due to the sheer volume of business, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. If the U.S. intelligence community had a lead, why had they not shared it with Facebook? During his meetings in DC, Stamos had come away with the feeling that members of Congress weren’t coming clean. No one had said a word about evidence surfaced by U.S. intelligence agencies.

They had reached an unspoken impasse: Warner felt that Stamos was not giving him full answers on what Facebook knew about Russia, and Stamos believed Warner was withholding information from intelligence agencies about Russia’s capabilities. Both men were wrong.

As they sat across the conference table, Sandberg weighed in. “We are wrapping this up,” she told Warner, locking eyes with the senator. She gave him a reassuring smile as she promised that Facebook would come to his office with anything new. The company, she said, was confident it had found the vast majority of the Russian activity.

Stamos was taken aback. While it was true that he had shared the bulk of Project P’s findings with Warner, his team suspected there was much more to be uncovered and were still digging into the Russian activity. Even as they met, his threat intelligence team was searching for the Russian ads. He felt he had to hedge Sandberg’s positivity.

He gently added to his boss’s assessment. Facebook, he said, had uncovered a lot, but it was not sure that other Russian groups weren’t still active. Stamos turned directly to Warner and asked once more for assistance: “Can you help us, share with us anything you know?” Warner demurred but promised to keep in touch.

Stamos left the meeting feeling doubly concerned. Clearly, Sandberg wasn’t being briefed on the real-time operations of his team. Worse yet, she had just told a sitting senator, one of the most powerful in Washington, that Facebook considered its investigation into Russian election interference complete. He dashed off an email to the threat intelligence team stressing the importance of developing a system to track down the Russian ads. If U.S. intelligence officials were unwilling to provide Facebook with their information, Facebook would have to search for the needle in the haystack itself.

In Washington, the threat intelligence team resumed their search in the only way they knew: through trial and error. Jen Weedon, Ned Moran, and others were painstakingly sifting through Facebook’s immense ad trove. They began by reviewing every advertisement run in the year leading up to the November 2016 elections and compiling a list of every ad that contained political messaging. They also ran searches for ads that mentioned the candidates by name and their running mates. Those searches yielded hundreds of thousands of results.

They needed first to determine which, if any, of the ads had been bought by someone in Russia. The group searched for all ads bought by accounts that had Russian set as their default language. Another search targeted ads that were bought by Russian-based accounts. Yet another returned all ads that had been paid for using rubles.

The group also used the platform’s access to detailed account metadata. They saw, for instance, if the person who bought the ad had accidentally forgotten to turn off their location information on a previous occasion and had popped up with an IP address located in Russia. Facebook also had the ability to check the phone or computer from which an advertisement was purchased. In many cases, the ads appeared to have been purchased through phones that had Russian SIM cards installed, even if they were using technology to try to mask their location. In other cases, the phones appeared to be secondhand, and even though the current SIM cards in the phone had no location data, Facebook saw that the phones had previously been used with Russian SIMs.

It was Moran who found the first group of advertisements that appeared to have been purchased from Saint Petersburg. He had been bringing his work home with him, searching late into the night. The rest of his team was accustomed to his singular focus and the way in which he could seemingly go whole days without speaking as he analyzed the data in front of him. It was due precisely to this intense focus that he began noticing the accounts tied to Saint Petersburg: the name had stuck in his memory because of a New York Times exposé written in 2015 about a Russian group known as the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. In the story, the reporter, Adrian Chen, had traveled to Saint Petersburg and documented Russia’s efforts to use a troll army stationed at the IRA to shape pro-Russian narratives across the internet. Moran scanned the article again to check, and sure enough, Saint Petersburg was listed as the headquarters for the IRA.