Facebook pulls down hundreds of pages
Accounts were linked to Russia, suspected of spreading fake news
Facebook said Thursday that it has taken down more than 400 pages linked to operations in Russia in amove the company said was part of its efforts to cut down on the spreading of fake news on the social media platform.
In a blog post, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the fake accounts stemmed from two operations. The largest operation, which operated out of the Baltics, Central Asia, and Central and Eastern European countries, included 364 pages and accounts linked to employees at Moscowbased Russian news agency Sputnik.
Facebook said those 364 pages and accounts spent approximately $135,000 on advertising and garnered 790,000 followers.
Facebook also took down another 107 Facebook groups, pages and accounts,
and 41 Instagram accounts that it said originated in Russia and were run out of Ukraine. The company said all the accounts were taken down for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
“We didn’t find any links between these operations, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” Gleicher said. “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.”