This is likely how the next wave of political ads run by foreign groups is going to hit Facebook. I know back when I was a mod on reddit, there were several groups that used similar tactics...
The rented accounts were also key to avoiding detection by Facebook, and obscuring who had bought the ads. Campaigns would be purchased using different rented accounts that paid with different credit cards. This shell game concealed that the accounts and their ads were actually all being run by the same operation. Facebook would shut down accounts and pages, sources said, but it was never able to connect them back to Ads Inc.
This is likely how the next wave of political ads run by foreign groups is going to hit Facebook. I know back when I was a mod on reddit, there were several groups that used similar tactics (although they were for products not politics in my case). If organizations can get around the FEC laws and trick Facebook, google, twitter, reddit, etc into thinking the ads and accounts are legit, then it will just get even harder to prevent more situations like Cambridge Analytica.
Buzzfeed posted another article today related to this, where they found out that Ads Inc. had been bribing a Facebook contractor to reactivate their banned ad accounts:...
This is likely how the next wave of political ads run by foreign groups is going to hit Facebook. I know back when I was a mod on reddit, there were several groups that used similar tactics (although they were for products not politics in my case). If organizations can get around the FEC laws and trick Facebook, google, twitter, reddit, etc into thinking the ads and accounts are legit, then it will just get even harder to prevent more situations like Cambridge Analytica.
Buzzfeed posted another article today related to this, where they found out that Ads Inc. had been bribing a Facebook contractor to reactivate their banned ad accounts: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-fired-employee-bribed-ads-inc