One Facebook ad touts an event to “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims!” with a picture of a woman in a hijab beside Hillary Clinton.
Another for a group called “Stop A.I.” urged viewers to “like and share if you want burqa banned in America,” because the full-body covering could be hiding a terrorist.
The ads taking opposing sides of the same issue were linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the American political process and whip up tensions around divisive social issues.
Lawmakers probing Russian election meddling released dozens of the ads for the first Wednesday as representatives from leading social media companies testified on Capitol Hill. Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees grilled Silicon Valley giants, Facebook, Twitter and Google over their inability to stop Kremlin propaganda from exploiting their social media platforms.
U.S. intelligence agencies have said the Russian government exploited social media as part of a sprawling, and surreptitious, campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating potential ties between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to tip the election, and prosecutors this week announced the first charges in that probe.
The Facebook ads released by members of the House Intelligence Committee are just a sample of the ones purchased by Russians to sow discord on hot-button issues.
In preparation for this week’s congressional hearings Facebook disclosed that content generated by a Russian group, the Internet Research Agency, potentially reached as many as 126 million users. Facebook had earlier turned over more than 3,000 advertisements linked to that group.
Several ads released Wednesday used broken English and had punctuation mistakes, like a coloring book for Bernie Sanders supported by a group calling itself “LGBT United,” which read: “stop taking this whole thing too serious. The coloring is something that suits for all people. …”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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