Facebook Bans Pages Aimed at US Election Interference

Facebook says it has removed 32 accounts and pages believed to have been set up to influence the mid-term US elections in November.

It said it was in the “very early” stages of the investigation and did not yet know who was behind the pages.

It said the creators had gone to greater lengths to hide their identities than a Russiabased campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential vote.

It described attempts to erase election inter-

ference as an “arms race.” What did Facebook discover?

The social network said in a blog that it had identified 17 suspect profiles on Facebook and seven Instagram accounts.

It said that there were more than 9,500 Face

book posts created by the accounts and one piece of content on Instagram. In total more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages involved, it added.

Facebook said the suspect accounts had also run about 150 ads on Facebook and Instagram, costing a total of $11,000 (£8,300). The most popular fake accounts were: Aztlan, Warriors, Black Elevation, Mindful Being and Resisters.

Why can’t Facebook be sure who is responsible?

The “bad actors” went to far greater lengths to cover their tracks than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) had in the past, Facebook said.

This included using virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their location, and using third parties to run ads on their behalf. Furthermore, the social network said it had not found evidence of Russian IP (internet protocol) addresses.

But it did find one link between the IRA and the new accounts. One of disabled IRA accounts shared a Facebook event hosted by the Resisters page.

The page also briefly listed an IRA account as one of its administrators. BBC