Facebook bans propaganda accounts

Social media giant removes dozens of phoney profiles targeting U.S. midterm elections

Facebook announced Tuesday it has identified a co-ordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had de- tected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the centre of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election. But company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Facebook said the accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018, and first discovered two weeks ago. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, the company said.

Between April 2017 and June 2018, the accounts ran 150 ads costing $11,000 on the two platforms. And the pages created roughly 30 events over a similar time period, the largest of which attracted interest from 4,700 accounts.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency, but that the actors had better disguised their efforts, using VPNs, internet phone services and third parties to purchase ads for them. He said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses, like the ones sometimes used in the past by Internet Research Agency accounts. But there were also connections between some of the accounts and others tied to the notorious Russian troll farm that were taken down by Facebook already.

“These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions we’ve taken to prevent abuse over the past year,” Gleicher said.

The company has been working with the FBI to investigate the activity.

Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues.