On Thursday, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee published more than 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads linked to the Russian propaganda group Internet Research Agency, making it the largest trove of these ads the public has seen to date.

Since last fall, when Facebook disclosed it had sold political ads to Russian actors in the run-up to the 2016 election, details about the IRA's handiwork have trickled out mainly in the form of independent research, individual exhibits presented during congressional testimony, and an indictment of IRA officials by special counsel Robert Mueller. Facebook, meanwhile, has declined to share a comprehensive list of accounts and Pages associated with the IRA on Facebook and Instagram.

With Thursday's disclosure, the House Democrats are painting a fuller picture, which they hope will help assist in further research about the IRA's extensive operation.

"Ultimately, by exposing these advertisements, we hope to better protect legitimate political expression and discussions and better safeguard Americans from having their information ecosystem polluted by foreign adversaries," wrote representative Adam Schiff, ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “We will continue to work with Facebook and other tech companies to expose additional content, advertisements, and information as our investigation progresses.”

The newly revealed ads, some of which are redacted to protect the privacy of innocent Facebook users, track closely to what's already known about the IRA's tactics. The ads date back to early 2015 and continue through August of 2017, covering topics including LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, immigration, Islam, veteran issues, the Second Amendment, Texas secession, and the presidential candidates themselves. The Pages implicated in this disclosure largely mirror a list published last year by the Russian media outlet RBC, which until now has been the largest list of suspected accounts published anywhere. But there are new names in the House committee's collection, too, including an account called "Black guns matter," which had more than 4,000 likes in November of 2016.

As was clear during the congressional hearings with tech giants last November, the IRA's ads on Facebook and Instagram often staked out both sides of the same issue. One ad, created by the page United Muslims of America in June of 2016 and targeted at people whose interests on Facebook included Hillary Clinton and the Muslim Brotherhood, showed Clinton smiling with a woman in a hijab. It invited people to an event entitled "Support Hillary. Save American Muslims!"