ACTIVE POLITICAL INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN IDENTIFIED
The social media giant is using a proactive tack to ward off a major national security threat by working with the FBI and other intelligence agencies on the matter, write NICHOLAS FANDOS and KEVIN ROOSE
ON Tuesday, Facebook said it had identified a coordinated political influence campaign that was potentially designed to disrupt November’s midterm elections, with the social network detecting and removing 32 pages and fake accounts that engaged in activity around divisive social issues.
The Silicon Valley company did not definitively link the campaign to Russia. But, Facebook officials said some of the tools and techniques used by the accounts were similar to those used by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked group that was at the centre of an indictment this year alleging interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“At this point in our investigation, we do not have enough technical evidence to state definitively who is behind it,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy. “But we can say that these accounts engaged in some similar activity and have connected with known IRA accounts.”
The jolting disclosure, delivered to lawmakers in private briefings on Capitol Hill this week and in a public Facebook post Tuesday, underscored how behind-the-scenes interference in the midterm elections has begun.
In recent weeks, there have been reports of other meddling, including a Daily Beast report that the office of Claire McCaskill of Missouri, one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this fall, was unsuccessfully targeted by Russian hackers last year, which McCaskill confirmed. US intelligence officials have indicated that at least one other unnamed Democratic senator up for reelection has been targeted.
Facebook’s announcement Tuesday was a proactive tack to ward off a major national security threat. Company officials said they were working with the FBI and other intelligence agencies on the matter. And, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and other executives mounted a media blitz after the announcement to explain what the company did and did not know about the influence campaign.
Those actions were a far cry from last year’s efforts, when the social network was widely criticised for failing to detect Russian interference in the 2016 election. It took Facebook executives months to acknowledge the extent of the Russian operation and release information connected with their investigation.
Since then, Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have been under siege from lawmakers and regulators for other scandals, including data misuse, a misinformation epidemic and allegations of political bias. Last week, the company lost more than US$120 billion (RM490 billion) in market value as it projected it would spend more money on moderation and security.
Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, did not directly address Facebook’s findings with reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, but he said President Donald Trump had “made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference into our electoral process from any nation state or other malicious actors”.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump declared again on Twitter that there had been “No Collusion” between his campaign and the Russians and asserted that, in any case, “collusion is not a crime”.
Lawmakers from both parties quickly set aside questions of who had perpetrated the influence campaign and said Facebook’s disclosure only clarified what they had feared since the extent of Russian involvement in 2016 became clear more than a year ago: that social media companies would be unable to keep up with the pace and scope of malicious efforts to abuse their platforms.
Facebook said the recently purged accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and were discovered two weeks ago. More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, which had names like Aztlan Warriors, Black Elevation, Mindful Being and Resisters, the company said.
Between April 2017 and June 2018, the accounts ran 150 ads costing US$11,000 on the two platforms. They were paid for in US and Canadian dollars. The pages created roughly 30 events over a similar period, the largest of which attracted interest from 4,700 accounts.
Finding suspicious activity was harder this time around, Facebook said. Unlike many of the alleged Russian trolls in 2016, who paid for Facebook ads in rubles and occasionally used Russian Internet protocol addresses, these accounts used advanced security
Facebook said the recently purged accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and were discovered two weeks ago.