Facebook deletes more pages tied to troll factory

Facebook said Tuesday that it had found and removed more than 270 accounts and pages controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the troll factory that became notorious for posting fraudulent and divisive material on the service ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Saying that most of the accounts and pages were in Russian, Facebook did not claim the accounts had violated the company’s policies, but it said they had been taken down because of the Internet Research Agency’s past fraud.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters that the Russian company, which operates under several names, “has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere.”

In a blog post, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, said that “uncovering this activity took months of work by our team.” He said the company had taken down 70 accounts and 138 pages on Facebook and 65 accounts on Instagram, which Facebook owns.

Stamos said that more than 1 million people had followed the Facebook pages and that 493,000 had followed the Instagram accounts. He said the company would update a tool to allow Facebook and Instagram users to find out whether they had followed the pages and users.

The Menlo Park company also deleted $167,000 worth of ads purchased by the Russian controlled pages.

The Internet Research Agency came to widespread attention with a profile in the New York Times Magazine in 2015 describing how its paid trolls posted false stories and inflammatory comments on various sites across the Internet.

In September, Facebook disclosed that it had discovered and taken down several hundreds fraudulent profiles and pages, most of them praising Donald Trump, denigrating Hillary Clinton or simply spreading inflammatory memes and comments on such divisive issues as race, immigration and guns.

In February, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, indicted 13 Russians associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, who is on the House Intelligence Committee, said he is pleased that Facebook had made its actions public.