Bogus pages deleted

Facebook Inc. said it disrupted two campaigns run by fake accounts with links to Russia and its Sputnik news service as it continues to grapple with misinformation on its platform.

Facebook removed 289 pages and 75 accounts it says were engaged in “inauthentic behavior” and targeted Facebook members in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Central and Eastern Europe.

In a blog post Thursday by Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy, Facebook said about 790,000 accounts follow one or more of the pages, and $135,000 was spent on ads, which were paid for in euros, rubles and U.S. dollars.

The pages, he said, were linked to employees of Sputnik, an online Moscowbased news service founded in 2014 by Rossiya Segodnya, the country’s biggest statesponsored news holding, which includes the RT cable channel.

In a statement, a representative for Sputnik said Facebook’s decision was “practically censorship.”

Facebook has been battling foreign influence on its site. Late last year, the social media company said it took down some accounts ahead of the U.S. midterms that authorities told them might possibly be from the Russian Internet Research Agency — the same group that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted for alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The pages and accounts linked to Sputnik and were being represented as independent news pages, Gleicher said in an interview. The pages contained antiNATO sentiment and encouraged protests. The first ad ran in 2013, the most recent this month. He said Facebook had identified overlap with activity by the Internet Research Agency.

“We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post,” Gleicher said in the blog post. “In these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”

Sputnik operates online portals with reporting in about 30 languages.