4 5 1 4 1 2 1 . Facebook and Google have faced pressure from lawmakers after disclosures of Russia-linked interference russian foreign influence their platforms last year. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner spoke about online political ads and preventing foreign interference in elections this month. The detailed disclosures, sent to Congress on Monday by companies whose products are among the most widely used on the internet, came before a series of congressional hearings this week into how third parties used social networks and online services to influence millions of Americans before the 2016 presidential election.

The new information goes far beyond what the companies have revealed in the past and underline the breadth of the Kremlin’s efforts to lever open divisions in the United States using American technology platforms, especially Facebook. In its prepared remarks sent to Congress, Facebook said the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin, had posted roughly 80,000 pieces of divisive content that was shown to about 29 million people between January 2015 and August 2017. Those posts were then liked, shared and followed by others, spreading the messages to tens of millions more people. 100,000 in advertisements paid for by the Internet Research Agency. Colin Stretch, the general counsel for Facebook who will appear at the hearings, said in his prepared remarks. The new information also illuminated when Facebook knew there had been Russian interference on its platform. Several times before the election last Nov.

8, Facebook said its security team discovered threats targeted at employees of the major American political parties from a group called APT28, an agency that United States law enforcement officials have previously linked to Russian military intelligence operations. Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users’ News Feeds everyday. Between 2015 and 2017, people in the United States saw more than 11 trillion posts from Pages on Facebook. Twitter, in its prepared remarks, said it had discovered more than 2,700 accounts on its service that were linked to the Internet Research Agency between September 2016 and November 2016. Those accounts, which Twitter has suspended, posted roughly 131,000 tweets over that period.