Not so fast. Facebook is apparently not done looking into whether Russian hackers influenced the Brexit referendum campaign.
The social network told a British parliamentary committee in a letter Wednesday that it will reopen its investigation after UK lawmakers said they weren’t satisfied with the company’s findings last month.
Facebook says it will look further into Russians meddled in the Brexit campaign.
In October, parliamentary committee chair Damian Collins wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to share similar material that US congressional committees received in its probe of Russian election meddling. Facebook said that more than 126 million users in America saw inflammatory political ads bought by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-backed internet troll farm, during the 2016 US campaign.
Representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter promised Wednesday during a US Senate committee hearing to provide more transparency and to take proactive measures to prevent such propaganda from happening again.
British lawmakers are worried that Russians may have had a role in the hotly-debated referendum last year in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. Facebook said its initial investigation found “a minimal amount” of UK-related activity.
In Wednesday’s letter, Facebook’s UK policy director Simon Miller told Collins that the company’s latest investigation will be “looking to see if we can identify other similar clusters engaged in coordinated activity” around the referendum.
Miller said the probe could take several weeks.
“We are committed to making all reasonable efforts to establish whether or not there was coordinated activity similar to that which was found in the US,” he said.
