WHACK- A- MOLE: SOCIAL MEDIA AND RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE

Facebook is spending heavily to avoid a repeat of the Russian interference that played out on its service in 2016, bringing on thousands of human moderators and advanced artificial intelligence systems to weed out fake accounts and foreign propaganda campaigns.

But it may never get the upper hand. Its adversaries are wily, more adept at camouflaging themselves and apparently aren’t always detectable by Facebook’s muchvaunted AI. They employ better operational security, constantly test Facebook’s countermeasures and then exploit whatever holes they find.

With the US midterm elections approaching and renewed scrutiny on Capitol Hill, Facebook revealed this week that it has uncovered and removed 32 apparently fake accounts and pages. The accounts appear designed to manipulate Americans’ political opinions using tactics similar to those adopted ahead of the 2016 presidential election on social- media services, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Reddit. This time, however, whoever is responsible is doing a better job hiding their tracks. They are buying ads with US or Canadian dollars, not rubles, and using virtual private networks and other methods to look more like people logging in from US locations.

Facebook has not said who’s responsible for the latest influence campaign. The fake accounts, however, resemble those created from 2014 to 2016 by the IRA.