Then, on September 6, 2017, Facebook’s vice president of security, Alex Stamos, posted “An Update on Information Operations on Facebook.” Despite the innocuous headline, the post began with a bombshell: Facebook had uncovered one hundred thousand dollars of Russian spending on three thousand ads from June 2015 through May 2017. The three thousand ads were connected to 470 accounts that Facebook labeled as “inauthentic.” One hundred thousand
