Facebook to continue its probe into Russian meddling on Brexit

Not so fast. Facebook is apparently not done looking into whether Russian hackers influenced the Brexit referendum campaign.

The social network told a British parliamentary committee in a letter Wednesday that it will reopen its investigation after UK lawmakers said they weren't satisfied with the company's findings last month. 

In October, parliamentary committee chair Damian Collins wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to share similar material that US congressional committees received in its probe of Russian election meddling. Facebook said that more than 126 million users in America saw inflammatory political ads bought by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-backed internet troll farm, during the 2016 US campaign.  

Representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter promised Wednesday during a US Senate committee hearing to provide more transparency and to take proactive measures to prevent such propaganda from happening again. 

British lawmakers are worried that Russians may have had a role in the hotly-debated referendum last year in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. Facebook said its initial investigation found "a minimal amount" of UK-related activity. 

In Wednesday's letter, Facebook UK policy director Simon Milner told Collins that the company's latest investigation will be "looking to see if we can identify other similar clusters engaged in coordinated activity" around the referendum. 

Milner said the probe could take several weeks. 

"We are committed to making all reasonable efforts to establish whether or not there was coordinated activity similar to that which was found in the US," he said. 

Correction, 2:35 p.m.: A Facebook exec's last name was misspelled. His name is Simon Milner.

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