Moscow has nothing to do with political advertisements on Facebook that were allegedly aimed at influencing the 2016 US presidential election, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
“We don’t know who placed the advertisements on Facebook or how, and have never done it. The Russian side has never been part of it,” Peskov told journalists on Friday.
Earlier, Facebook reported that a Russian agency had purchased some ads on the social network during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Facebook co-founder and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday that the company is “actively working with the US government on its ongoing investigations into Russian interference.”
The company also said that it “will help government authorities complete the vitally important work of assessing what happened in the 2016 election.”
“We are looking into foreign actors, including additional Russian groups and other former Soviet states, as well as organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools,” Zuckerberg said.
Earlier in September, Facebook said it had discovered some 3,000 ads purchased between June 2015 and May 2017, connected to 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages, which might have been related Russia’s alleged meddling.
However, the company did not directly accuse Russia and admitted that the “vast majority of ads run by these accounts”had nothing to do with the election, voting, or a particular candidate.
