Earlier this week, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released roughly 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm. Among them: Ads purchased in May of 2016 that promoted a suspicious Chrome extension that gained wide access to the Facebook accounts and web browsing behavior of those who installed it.

The ads, dozens in total, prompted users to install the extension, a music app called FaceMusic; when they did, some users reported that it began messaging all of their Facebook friends. The landing page for the ads, musicfb.info, was registered in April of 2016 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the IRA is based.

The most successful ad, which yielded 28 clicks, specifically targeted American girls, ages 14 to 17, who Facebook classified as interested in free software and music. Other ads for FaceMusic targeted interest categories like Shazam, Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud.

The ads containing the extension, purchased by the IRA's phony anti-immigrant Facebook page Stop All Invaders, were discovered by Jonathan Albright, director of research at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

"Why would an anti-immigrant Russian Facebook Page be spending money to promote a music app?" Albright says.

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The landing site that the ad directed to, musicfb.info, is no longer active, but an archived version advertises a “unique browser extension, which allows you to play your favorite music on Facebook for free and share it with your friends.”

The extension is no longer active in the Chrome Web Store, either, and a Google spokesperson confirmed the company had also removed it from users' devices. "When we discover malicious extensions, we remove them from the Chrome Web Store and from every user's computer that has downloaded them," the spokesperson said. "We suspend the developer and remove their other extensions from the Store as well."

Facebook could not confirm the number of people who signed into the extension through Facebook. It's also unclear how many installed the extension after seeing the IRA's Facebook ads. In total, the ads received just over 80 clicks, according to the metadata released by Facebook. Most of the ads received no clicks at all, likely because they had nothing to do with the other content posted by the Stop All Invaders page, which included, among other things, photoshopped memes calling President Obama "a mere pawn in the hands of the Arabian Sheikhs."