The number of people who we know were exposed to Russian-backed election content on Facebook keeps growing and growing. It’s now up to about a third of all Americans:
An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by NBC News.
Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”
That’s not to say that 126 million Americans saw Russian content with the same regularity that they saw their friends’ cat and baby and wedding photos, or that 126 million Americans’ votes were changed because of the Russian election content they saw on Facebook. But it is saying that this was a major campaign that got closer to your life than you probably thought.