Facebook removes pages from Russia, Iran

Facebook has taken down more than 600 phony pages, groups and accounts that were part of two separate disinformation campaigns — organized by Russia and Iran — targeting people worldwide, the company announced Tuesday night.

The revelation is unusual for targeting people in many countries and for involving a nation-state actor other than Russia, which has been the main focus of reporting on disinformation operations targeting the United States. The discovery was made by cybersecurity firm FireEye, Facebook said.

“We’ve removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy, in a blog post.

Facebook was a major target of Russian disinformation in 2016, hosting 470 pages and accounts that the company later discovered were created by the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. The agency bought thousands of ads targeting Americans, often with rubles, and created posts that reached 126 million Americans, frequently with divisive messages.

The company also took down 32 pages and accounts last month that reached 290,000 people with ads, events and regular posts on topics such as race, fascism and feminism.