https://www.cnet.com/news/how-russian-facebook-ads-targeted-us-voters-in-2016/

Before Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of congress and before the public revelation of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, there was the news that Russians bought Facebook ads aimed at US voters leading up to the 2016 election. A new research paper published April 11, 2018, details the scale and who was targeted by these Russian ads.

As reported by Wired, Young Mie Kim, when she was a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducted a six-week study leading up to the Nov. 8 election in 2016. She reversed engineered a way to document the groups that placed digital ads about sensitive issues like abortion, immigration, guns, race and candidate scandals.