"We know we have a responsibility to prevent everything we can from this happening on our platforms," COO Sheryl Sandberg told Axios. "So we told Congress and the Intelligence committees that when they are ready to release the ads, we are ready to help them."
On Wednesday, leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the connections between the ads and the election, said it would publicly release thousands of ads.
Facebook seems to now be making high-level executives available to media this week, but they don't appear to be providing lengthy or substantive public information. Sandberg’s remarks come as Facebook is under newfound scrutiny in the wake of reports that Russia used online ads to stoke various political opinions and possibly influence the 2016 presidential election.
Sandberg characterized the Russian ads and the prevalence of fake news as a "new threat," and she added that the company must offer "not just an apology, but determination for our role in enabling Russian interference during the election."
She didn't answer a later question as to whether the Trump campaign and the Russian-bought ads targeted the same users. "Targeting is something that everyone uses," she said. "When the ads get released we will be releasing the targeting for those ads."
Meanwhile, another Facebook executive said the company plans to change how it accepts political ads in the run-up to the November 2018 mid-term elections in the United States. CTO Mike Schroepfer told Reuters on Wednesday that the company was "working on all of this stuff actively now."
Schroepfer remained vague as to precisely what changes would be implemented, only telling the news outlet that there would be a "regular cadence of updates and changes."Other Facebook leaders responded Wednesday to less than half of a list of 10 detailed questions provided by The New York Times. The answers that the executives gave were generally non-specific. They were asked questions on topics that included the recent announcement that Facebook would add "1,000 human moderators," how many such moderators existed as of November 2016, and how many political ads were reviewed.
"We don’t usually share the sizes of specific teams at Facebook," Joel Osborne, a company spokesman, wrote to the Times. "Our teams review millions of ads around the world each week, and we use a mix of automated and manual processes. We’re not sharing an exact break-out of the number of manually reviewed political ads."
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