Facebook shuts more political accounts
▶ Company explores possible link to Russia-based troll farm
Facebook on Tuesday said it shut down more accounts aimed at influencing the US midterm elections and that it is exploring a possible link to Russia.
“As we’ve continued to investigate, we detected and removed some additional Facebook and Instagram accounts,” head of cyber security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in an update posted at the social network.
While stressing the challenge of identifying the culprits, he noted that a website claiming to be associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russia-based troll farm, published a list of Instagram accounts they said that they had created.
Facebook had already shut down most of those accounts, and blocked the rest after an internal investigation, according to Gleicher.
“Ultimately, this effort may have been connected to the IRA, but we aren’t best placed to say definitively whether that is the case,” Gleicher said.
On the eve of the midterm elections, Facebook announced it blocked some 30 accounts on its platform and 85 more on Instagram after police warned they may be linked to “foreign entities” trying to interfere.
On Tuesday, the number of accounts removed for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” was raised to 36 at Facebook and 99 at the social network’s Instagram service.
Most of the accounts were created after the middle of last year. Overall, the Instagram accounts had amassed about 1.25 million followers, with 600,000 of those people located in the United States, according to Facebook.
Meanwhile, the Facebook pages had attracted a total of approximately 65,000 followers in total, with posts mainly in French.
Most of the Instagram accounts were said to be in English.
Facebook blocked the initial accounts a day after being contacted by US law enforcement officials about online activity they believe may be linked to foreign entities.
A study published in late October found that misinformation on social media was spreading at a greater rate than during the run-up to the 2016 presidential vote, which Russia is accused of manipulating through a vast propaganda campaign in favor of Donald Trump, the eventual winner.