Russian troll Facebook ads released

Congress just released a mother lode of Facebook ads created by Russian trolls. Now anyone can comb through data on more than 3,000 Facebook ads that were purchased by Russian trolls. Between 2015 to late 2017, most of these ads were designed ro get peopled riled up and divided on hot button issues. Encouraging people to rally And the lawmakers say it was all done with the intent of hurting the US democracy and create political chaos. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee shard an eight gigabyte file of Facebook ad data. It breaks the ads down into several categories. There were 129 events created by these trolls. Events such as anti-Trump protests or pro-Muslim rallies [MUSIC] Sometimes the trolls would set up both the protest and the counter-protest, hoping to create an in-person conflict. About 62,000 people said they would attend these events. Now many were also focused around African-American issues, with ads designed to intensify racial tensions. One even called for people to be ready to fight. One of the more successful pages was called Black Matters. It had 224,000 followers. There were groups created to drum feelings on immigration issues as well as ads that targeted pro gun audiences. There was on popular group called Heart of Texas. It had ads calling for Texas to secede from the U.S. Russian trolls also made content on LGBT rights issues, and made fake Muslim ads under the group United Muslims of America. There were pro-military groups against Hillary Clinton, and when it comes to campaigns, most were promoting Trump or tried to attack the Clinton campaign. And then there's just some really bizarre, non political stuff in the mix. Russians had many failed attempts at creating joke memes. Just a bunch of unfunny garbage really. The data also included how many people saw each post and clicked on it, along with how much money was paid for the ads. In total, Russians spent about $100,000 on these promoted ads. But that doesn't count all the 80,000 Facebook posts that trolls made that were not paid ads. Last October Facebook revealed 126 million Americans saw these non-paid organic posts. And just last month, Facebook said it deleted 70 Facebook accounts, 65 Instagram accounts, and 138 Facebook pages All run by Russia's Internet Research Agency. I'm Bridget Carey, share your thoughts on the matter in the comments. And you can poke through some of these yourself at cnet.com