Facebook committed to helping investigators release Russia ads: Sandberg

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on Thursday that the company was fully committed to helping U.S. congressional investigators publicly release Russia-backed political ads that ran during the 2016 U.S. election.

Sandberg said during an interview with the Axios news website that "things happened on our platform in this election that shouldn't have happened."

Facebook recently gave congressional panels investigating allegations of Russian meddling during the election more than 3,000 politically divisive ads believed to have been bought by Russia.

The social media company found them on its network and said the ads appeared in the months before and after the election.

Sandberg said she was supportive of those ads being released in addition to the pages they were connected to.

"We don't want this kind of foreign interference" on Facebook, Sandberg said.

She added that in many cases, accounts were taken down because they were fake, but that if those accounts were run by real people, the social media network would have not removed them. (Additional reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Bernadette Baum)