The spokesperson argued that because people often find Instagram content through the Explore feature, follower counts are less significant. It's true that more people may have stumbled on the Russian troll content through Instagram's Explore portal, but it's the people who followed those accounts who were exposed to their divisive and often racist content on a regular basis. That's what makes the follower count so critical.

The claim that Facebook was never asked to provide information on how many people followed these accounts is bold given Feinstein’s question in the fall did not exclude Instagram. “For the accounts your companies have identified as linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA): How many people followed these accounts?” she asked. It’s bolder still when you consider the extent of the Russian trolls’ activism on Instagram; according to Facebook’s own testimony, the Agency had 170 Instagram accounts, versus the 120 pages they hosted on Facebook. And those Instagram accounts shared 120,000 pieces of propaganda content, compared to the 80,000 pieces of content on Facebook. Facebook estimates that Instagram content reached 20 million people, but the company has never commented publicly on how many followers those accounts received.

That’s a critical number not just for the sake of historical accuracy, but also because following an account means you’re more likely to see everything that account shares, versus accounts you simply stumble on in Instagram's Explore section. Albright, who has spent the last year trying to reconstruct what happened, calls Facebook's response “infuriating.”

“It’s the same memes, only they’re more specialized, and more highly engaged,” Albright says of the Instagram content, some of which he was able to scrape off the Internet. While the original accounts have been deleted, many of the ugliest memes they created are still readily searchable on Instagram, hosted by accounts that reshared the original posts with their own networks. According to Albright, so-called "regramming" tools helped ensure these posts were spread far and wide beyond the original accounts.

Albright has no way of knowing how many of the 2.2 million Instagram followers of those 27 accounts he tracked were fake, or how many of them followed several pages. But given that Facebook has declined to share the actual number, it seems the company is knowingly leaving the public record incomplete.

This is not the first time Facebook has tried to minimize Instagram’s role, either. When Facebook initially acknowledged it had sold 3,000 ads to the Russian trolls in October, it did not include Instagram in its report. It wasn’t until after a reporter at Fast Company asked Facebook whether any of those ads appeared on Instagram that Eliot Schrage, the company’s vice president of policy and communications, added a single, unpublicized bullet point to his earlier blog post, acknowledging the Russians bought ads on Instagram, too.

For Albright, this all feels like déjà vu. When Facebook first announced that Internet Research Agency trolls had bought ads on the platform, it said that 10 million users were exposed to those ads. Albright consulted the numbers he collected on another site called CrowdTangle, which Facebook owns, and found that while the reach of the ads might have been relatively small, the organic posts that these pages shared with their followers reached hundreds of millions of people. In his testimony before Congress a few weeks later, Facebook’s general counsel said that in fact 126 million people had been exposed to the propaganda group's posts on Facebook. He also acknowledged another 20 million people were exposed on Instagram, ratcheting the total number up to 146 million people exposed.