Amid pressure to reveal more about Russian use of Facebook Inc.'s platform to potentially interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the social media giant's general counsel, Colin Stretch, revealed plans Thursday to turn over Russian-related ads to Congress.

“This has been a difficult decision,” Stretch wrote in his Sept. 21 post on the company's website. “Disclosing content is not something we do lightly under any circumstances,” he continued, adding, however, that the company believes “the public deserves a full accounting of what happened in the 2016 election, and we've concluded that sharing the ads we've discovered, in a manner that is consistent with our obligations to protect user information, can help.”

On Sept. 6, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos announced that around 3,000 ads, which amounted to approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June 2015 to May 2017, were connected to accounts out of Russia. The vast majority of the ads, Stamos wrote, “didn't specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but instead “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” Stamos added that the roughly 470 Russia-linked accounts have been shut down.