What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

We also learned more from Facebook, which finally admitted it had found around 200,000 posts or other content created by Russian trolls that were viewed by 146 million people on either Facebook or Instagram. That’s not even counting thousands of paid advertisements seen by millions more. As Tristan Harris, a former Google executive who has become an important voice on the challenges facing social media, put it, “Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election.” Twitter also notified 1.4 million users in the United States that they had followed, retweeted, or liked content from at least one of thousands of Russia-linked accounts during the election. All this was accompanied by the explosive revelations about Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm backed by Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon that worked for Trump during the campaign. The firm obtained the personal data of 87 million Facebook users under false pretenses and weaponized that information on behalf of the Trump campaign. Facebook knew what Mercer’s firm was up to as far back as 2015 but didn’t alert users or ensure that the data was secured or deleted. In fact, Facebook’s vast trove of personal data has been far more open to manipulation and abuse than most people realized.