President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Friday morning to dismiss reports that Russia had bought ads on Facebook during the 2016 election as simply another part of the “Russia hoax.”
His tweets came a day after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would submit to Congress more than 3,000 ads purportedly linked to Russian actors. Facebook had announced on Wednesday that 470 “inauthentic” accounts had spent a collective $100,000 on ads between June 2015 and May 2017.
“The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook,” Trump said. “What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?
“The greatest influence over our election was the Fake News Media ‘screaming’ for Crooked Hillary Clinton,” he added. “Next, she was a bad candidate!”
A wide range of American intelligence officials have concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in an attempt to tip the race in Trump’s favor.
Facebook has been the subject of election-related scrutiny for months. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, his critics pointed fingers at the social media platform, saying it had allowed anti-Clinton fake news articles to circulate.
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