Majority of divisive Facebook ads bought by 'suspicious groups' - study

FILE PHOTO: Silhouettes of laptop users are seen next to a screen projection of Facebook logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

(Reuters) - Most of the political ads about divisive issues that ran on Facebook Inc before the 2016 U.S. presidential election were sponsored by "suspicious groups" with no publicly available information about them, according to a study released on Monday and based on a database of five million ads on Facebook.

One in six of those groups was linked to Russia, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/document/report-closing-digital-loopholes-pave-way-foreign-interference-us-elections, and the identities of the rest of the 122 groups that are labelled "suspicious" are still unknown, an indication of the influence of "astroturf" or shell companies in U.S. politics.