daily beast found this group secured borders which purports to be an american group. it is not an american group. it was operated by russian agents. daily beast had the first report on them back on september 11th that this was one of these fake i d at this time russian facebook groups that appeared to be american but it wasn t. what it was trying to do online was ginn up fear of immigrants. secured borders tried to get americans to go anti-clinton rallies in places like idaho. then two days later business insider turned up another facebook entity secretly run out of russia. this was called heart of particulars. not operated from texas, it s operated from russia. some of that is evident in their hilarious effort to sound texan or to even sound english speaking. this one s great and memorable. in love with texas shape. close. you guys are close but not quite
secured borders or blackty visits. they didn t just have a facebook account. they had an instagram account. they had a twitter account. if you clicked on twitter, it would take you to a web page where you would be tracked by tracking software. that could be fed into facebook where you were receiving turbocharged targets ads. there s really a lot of connections between these platforms and that is what we re just starting to uncover. if these companies, facebooking in particular either had a change of heart or got very brave about what they might find if they look at this stuff or if they were compelled by subpoena or search warrant to actually really find as many of these things are findable out there, what s your level of confidence that they really could produce a lot of content, that they really could find most of what was done by russia? oh my god, it s a great question. i don t think they can find everything. i think that a lot of i think that genuinely people who work in sec
i think they can produce a lot more. look at what they ve done. essentially google essentially facebook tied their ads to one russian troll farm. it was kawed the internet research agency. 470 ads and only $100,000. that s nothing compared to these businesses. google today, we have tens of thousands of dollars. think about how much trump the trump campaign spent on facebook. the trump campaign spent $70 million on facebook. so we know that if this was a massive influence campaign, a lot more was spent. right now it seems like they re only looking at single sources. one question will be whether the intelligence community helped them. a lot of what we ve heard is that in previous situations where tech was involved in a national crisis, for example, during isis, the interrogation community was actually sharing information with the tech companies. that helped them get to the bottom of things more quickly. we haven t seen that this time. they re also crying for help. biz dwoskin, sili
there. and this heart of texas group was an i love texas group, but and a pro texas secession group but mostly they appear to have been anti-hillary clinton. some of it idiomaticly correct and some of it not. this one i don t know what it means literally by i get the point anyway. no hypoclintos in the god-blessed texas. i don t know what they mean. figuratively i get it. they also promoted hillary for prison. this was them too. hillary, stay away from texas, with the photo shopped image of her with osama bin laden. ultimately this russian group on facebook started to promote an idea that must have seemed like a very satisfying prospect to moscow if they could ever pull this off, right? right before the election, this russian run texas facebook group switched over to this as their theme.
apparently knew it, maybe all this reporting that we re getting now would be six months further along. but for whatever reason facebook decided they wouldn t admit anything about russia using their platform until september. we ve had this long delay to in terms of as a country coming to any understanding of what russia was really doing to try to influence our election. facebook finally admitted that russia was active on their platform buying ads as of early september. since then we have had a month of really good reporting that has finally opened the flood gates so that we regular people, you know, not congressional investigators, not mueller s prosecutors, not people who work inside these tech companies, but regular americans can, through the virtues of good journalism, now see what exactly russia did. all right. daily beast was first less than a week after facebook had its initial admission in er i september.