Facebook plays whack-a-mole with foes

Manipulators getting harder to detect for election 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 much-vaunted AI. They employ better operational security, constantly test Facebook's countermeasures and then exploit whatever holes they find.

“They've got lots of very good, smart technical people, who are assessing the situation all the time and gaming the system,” said Mike Posner, a former U.S. diplomat who directs New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

With the U.S. 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 U.S. or Canadian dollars, not rubles, and using virtual private networks and other methods to look more like people logging in from U.S locations. “Offensive organizations improve their techniques once they have been uncovered,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote in a blog post Tuesday. That also makes it harder to know who Facebook's current adversaries are.

“Because the 2016 operation was widely seen as a success, it means a number of other players are likely entering the field,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University who is writing a book about 20th century disinformation efforts.

Much like during the Cold War — when Soviet agents once pretended to be the Ku Klux Klan to stoke racial division — the strategy remains to “strengthen the fringes, boosting the far right extremists and far left extremists at the same time,” Rid said.

Facebook has not said who's responsible for the latest influence campaign. The fake accounts, however, resemble those created from 2014 through 2016 by the Internet Research Agency, a so-called troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In February, U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 people , all of them associated with the IRA, for plotting to disrupt the 2016 election.