WASHINGTON: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Facebook said that the accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and first discovered two weeks ago. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, the company said.

Between April 2017 and June 2018, the accounts ran 150 ads costing $11,000 on the two platforms. They were paid for in American and Canadian dollars. And the pages created roughly 30 events over a similar time period, the largest of which attracted interest from 4,700 accounts.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency, but that the actors had better disguised their efforts, using VPNs, internet phone services and third parties to purchase ads for them. He said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses, like the ones sometimes used in the past by Internet Research Agency accounts. But there were also connections between some of the accounts and others tied to the notorious Russian troll farm that were taken down by Facebook already.

“These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions we’ve taken to prevent abuse over the past year,” Mr. Gleicher said.

The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity.

Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues.

Facebook discovered coordinated activity around issues like a sequel to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Specifically, a page called “Resisters,” which interacted with one Internet Research Agency account in 2017, created an event called “No Unite the Right 2 — DC” to serve as a counterprotest to the white nationalist gathering, scheduled to take place in Washington in August. Mr. Gleicher said “inauthentic” administrators for the “Resisters” page went as far as to coordinate with administrators for five other apparently real pages to co-host the event, publicizing details about transportation and other logistics.

Mr. Gleicher said it disabled the event on Tuesday and notified 2,600 users of the site who had indicated interest in attending the event.

Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, according to two people briefed on the findings. That echoed efforts in 2016 to fan division around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Democratic lawmakers said the disclosure only clarified what they have feared since the extent of Russian involvement in 2016 became clear more than a year ago.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has exerted intense pressure on the social media companies, praised Facebook on Tuesday for bringing the activity into the public but asked for its cooperation in updating laws to prevent influence campaigns.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” he said. “And I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity.”

After being caught flat-footed by the Internet Research Agency’s efforts to use social media to sow division ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook is trying to avoid a repeat disaster in 2018. The company has expanded its security team, hiring counterterrorism experts and recruiting workers with government security clearances.

The company is using artificial intelligence and teams of human reviewers to detect automated accounts and suspicious election-related activity. It has also tried to make it harder for Russian-style influence campaigns to use covert Facebook ads to sway public opinion, by requiring political advertisers in the United States to register with a domestic mailing address and by making all political ads visible in a public database.

On a conference call with reporters earlier this month, Mr. Gleicher declined to directly answer multiple questions about whether the company had detected additional Russian information campaigns.

“We know that Russians and other bad actors are going to continue to try to abuse our platform — before the midterms, probably during the midterms, after the midterms, and around other events and elections,” Mr. Gleicher said. “We are continually looking for that type of activity, and as and when we find things, which we think is inevitable, we’ll notify law enforcement, and where we can, the public.”

American intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning for months that Russia’s efforts to undermine American democracy remain active and pose a threat to this year’s elections. If in fact Russian, the activity would provide vivid evidence that the kind of cyber operations used around the 2016 campaign were still in use. </s> (Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. has identified an ongoing effort to influence the U.S. midterm elections, using inauthentic accounts and pages on the social network.

“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this,” Facebook said Tuesday in a blog post. “It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency has in the past.”

The company has stepped up its work to ferret out fake accounts after a Russian-backed effort sowed discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook and other social media networks have been criticized by lawmakers for failing to recognize and take steps to stop those efforts.

Facebook said that starting last week, it identified eight pages and 17 profiles on its main social network, and seven accounts on Instagram, that violated its rules. It shared the findings with U.S. law enforcement, Congress, and other technology companies. The company said it was letting the public know ahead of a real protest the fake accounts had planned and coordinated in the nation’s capital for next week.

The discovery of the election-interference campaign was earlier reported by the New York Times. </s> Facebook says it has removed more than 500 Pages and accounts that originated in Russia, some of which it claims are linked to Moscow-based news agency Sputnik.

The social network said it discovered two separate operations engaging in what it called “inauthentic behaviour” across Facebook and Instagram, involving attempts to “manipulate people”.

The accounts were removed because they had attempted to “mislead others about who they were and what they were doing”, Facebook said.

The first operation involved 289 Facebook Pages and 75 accounts representing themselves primarily as independent news or general interest pages and operating across a range of countries in central Asia and central and eastern Europe.

Facebook said it found the accounts were linked to Sputnik employees, some of which frequently posted about “anti-Nato sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption”.

The second operation – based on a tip-off from US law enforcement – included 107 Facebook Pages, Groups and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts and focused on Ukraine.

“The individuals behind these accounts primarily represented themselves as Ukrainian, and they operated a variety of fake accounts while sharing local Ukrainian news stories on a variety of topics, such as weather, protests, Nato, and health conditions at schools,” Facebook said.

“We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behaviour that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency (IRA) activity.”

The social network’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher said: “We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they post.

“In these cases, the people behind this activity co-ordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”

“While we are making progress rooting out this abuse, as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing challenge because the people responsible are determined and well funded.

“We constantly have to improve to stay ahead. That means building better technology, hiring more people and working more closely with law enforcement, security experts and other companies. Their collaboration was critical to these investigations.”

Previous investigations in the US found Facebook had been used by Russia to post content that aimed to influence and interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.

Last year, the social network removed more than 100 accounts on the eve of the US midterm elections in November it believed were linked to “foreign entities”, having also removed more than 80 Pages, Groups and accounts in October it claimed were linked to Iran. </s> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Investigators on two congressional panels are looking into whether Russia acquired the data of millions of Facebook users and if companies with ties to then-2016 Republican election candidate Donald Trump’s campaign played any role in providing it, three sources familiar with the inquiries said.

On Tuesday, Facebook said it had deleted 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook pages and 65 Instagram accounts that it said were “controlled” by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian propaganda arm based in St. Petersburg.

Last September, Facebook disclosed that it had suspended about 470 “inauthentic accounts” that it believed were “likely operated out of Russia” and had purchased 3,000 ads which “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages.”

And on Wednesday, the social media platform said the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will testify on April 10 and 11 to Congress.

In an indictment in February, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, charged IRA and 13 Russians with conspiring to interfere in U.S. politics and elections. Moscow denies tampering in U.S. elections and President Trump denies any coordination between his campaign and Russian officials.

Among the issues investigators on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are digging into are whether IRA and other Russian organizations used any Facebook data, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Also, whether the use of such data had any impact on the U.S. election, and how much Facebook data may have been acquired by Russian entities, the sources said.

Zuckerberg last month disclosed that in 2013, Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan, who ran a company called Global Science Research (GSR), created a personality quiz app that was installed by about 300,000 Facebook users.

Zuckerberg said that because of the way the Facebook platform worked at the time, this gave Kogan access to data of “tens of millions” of friends of users who took the quiz.

On Wednesday, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, acknowledged in a public posting that “the Facebook information of up to 87 million people - mostly in the US - may have been improperly shared” with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said Facebook learned in 2015 that Kogan shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. The London-based consulting firm received millions of dollars from the Trump campaign and a political action committee supported by financier Robert Mercer, who supported Trump. Zuckerberg said Kogan “misused” Facebook’s data.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement on Wednesday that it “did not use any” data it acquired from Kogan’s company in work related to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The firm added that it took legal action against GSR, and that it “immediately deleted the raw data” from its server when it learned from Facebook that the data had been “improperly obtained.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the House intelligence committee’s top Democrat, sent Kogan a letter requesting correspondence and message traffic on his dealings with Cambridge Analytica and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, any material related to Russia, and that Kogan agree to an interview.

Kogan said in an email to Reuters that he knows nothing about Facebook data being obtained by Russia and had never heard of the Internet Research Agency “until a few weeks ago.” </s> Los Angeles, Jul 31 (EFE).- Facebook announced Tuesday that it eliminated 32 accounts for what the company described as “coordinated inauthentic behavior” ahead of the mid-term US congressional elections in November.



“This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” Facebook said in a statement.



The social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg found itself at the center of controversy during the 2016 presidential election for the use of its platform to disseminate hoaxes and fake news.



“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts – including who may be behind this,”

Facebook acknowledged, while adding that “whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.”



IRA is accused by Facebook and the US Department of Justice of having played a key role in the campaign of hoaxes and fake news on controversial and divisive issues designed to try to influence the 2016 election in which Donald Trump won the White House.



In the current probe, the tech giant eliminated eight Facebook pages and 17 profiles, as well as seven Instagram accounts.



“In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017,” said Facebook.



Among the deleted pages was one called “Resisters,” which had created a Facebook Event – “No Unite the Right 2-DC” – a counterdemonstration to Unite the Right 2-DC, which had been called by the ultraright for Aug. 12 in Washington. </s> NEW YORK — Facebook said it has uncovered "sophisticated" efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.

The company said it removed 32 accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in "coordinated" political behavior and appeared to be fake.

Facebook stopped short of saying the effort was aimed at influencing the U.S. midterm elections in November, although the timing of the suspicious activity would be consistent with such an attempt.

According to a Facebook official, the company held briefings in the House and Senate this week. The official declined to be named because the briefings were private. Facebook disclosed its findings after The New York Times reported on them earlier Tuesday.

The company said it doesn't know who is behind the efforts, but said there may be connections to Russia. Facebook said it has found some connections between the accounts it removed and the accounts connected to Russia's Internet Research Agency that it removed before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

The earliest page was created in March 2017. Facebook says more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages. The most followed Facebook Pages had names such as "Aztlan Warriors," ''Black Elevation," ''Mindful Being," and "Resisters."

Facebook says the pages ran about 150 ads for $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in U.S. and Canadian dollars. The first ad was created in April 2017; the last was created in June 2018.

The company added that the perpetrators have been "more careful to cover their tracks" than in 2016, in part because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse over the past year. For example, they used virtual private networks and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf.

Associated Press Writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this story from Washington. </s> Facebook uncovered and cut ties with hundreds of fake accounts tied to Russia that were engaging in inauthentic behavior, the tech giant announced Thursday.

The latest purge of fake accounts spreading disinformation comes as the Menlo Park, Calif. company has battled the perception that it's not acting fast enough more than two years after Moscow harnessed Facebook to sow discord and boost the candidacy of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In October 2017, the tech giant admitted that up to 126 million Americans saw Russian-backed content over a two-year period. In December 2018, two major reports revealed a multifaceted, highly coordinated effort to divide the country and target the African-American community in the run-up to the presidential election.

"We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people," said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, in a blog post. "We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post."

The tech behemoth removed 364 Facebook Pages and accounts that originated in Russian but operated across the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Central and Eastern Europe, for their coordinated inauthentic behavior. Facebook said the pages and accounts were linked to employees of Sputnik, a Moscow-based news agency considered by many to be a propaganda outlet, and that the posts were often about topics such as "anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption."

The pages had a total of about 790,000 followers, and about $135,000 was spent on ads on Facebook, paid for in U.S. dollars, euros and rubles. Beyond that, the pages hosted 190 events, dating back to August 2015 and up to this month, although Facebook said it could not confirm whether any of these offline events actually took place.

In a separate but related action, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said it removed another set of Russia-backed Facebook and Instagram accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior in Ukraine, some of which overlapped with Russia-based activity before the U.S. midterm elections. This group of pages had about 180,000 followers and more than 55,000 accounts followed one or more of the Instagram accounts.

The company shared its findings with U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. Congress and other technology companies.

"Our security efforts are ongoing to help us stay a step ahead and uncover this kind of abuse, particularly in light of important political moments and elections in Europe this year," Gleicher said.

In April, Facebook removed 200 other accounts and pages linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that activated bots to spread misinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. </s> (Reuters) - Facebook Inc has identified a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead users and organize rallies ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections, taking down dozens of fake accounts on its site, the company said on Tuesday.

A Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper in the 2016 U.S. election by posting and buying ads on Facebook, according to the company and U.S. intelligence agencies. Moscow has denied involvement.

Facebook on Tuesday said here had it removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram, part of an effort to combat foreign meddling in U.S. elections, attempts that lawmakers have called dangerous for democracy.

The company said it was still in the early stages of its investigation and did not yet know who may be behind the influence campaign for 2018 elections that will determine whether or not the Republican Party keeps control of Congress.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on a call with reporters that the attempts to manipulate public opinion would likely become more sophisticated to evade Facebook’s scrutiny, calling it an “arms race.”

“This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” the company said in a blogpost.

More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages and that about $11,000 had been spent on about 150 ads, Facebook said. The pages had created about 30 events since May 2017.

Facebook for months has been on the defensive about influence activity on its site and concerns over user privacy tied to longstanding agreements with developers that allowed them access to private user data.

Facebook identified influence activity around at least two issues, including a counter-protest to a “Unite the Right II” rally set next week in Washington. The other was the #AbolishICE social media campaign aimed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In the blogpost, Facebook said it was revealing the influence effort now in part because of the rally. A previous event last year in Charlottesville, South Carolina, led to violence by white supremacists.

Facebook said it would tell users who had expressed interest in the counter-protest what action it had taken and why.

Facebook officials on a call with reporters said that one known account from Russia’s Internet Research Agency was a co-administrator of one of the fake pages for seven minutes, but the company did not believe that was enough evidence to attribute the campaign to the Russian government.

The company previously had said 126 million Americans may have seen Russian-backed political content on Facebook over a two-year period, and that 16 million may have been exposed to Russian information on Instagram.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, in a statement urged Facebook to move against foreign groups trying to sway American voters and to warn legitimate users that such activity, as seen in 2016, is recurring this year.

“Today’s announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we’ve long feared: that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously-identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponize social media platforms to influence the U.S. electorate,” Schiff said.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, said in a statement there would be a hearing on Wednesday about the online threat to U.S. election security.

Burr said the goal of influence operations “is to sow discord, distrust, and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system. The Russians want a weak America.”

Washington imposed punitive sanctions on Russia following U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Moscow interfered to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections, one of the reasons U.S.-Russian relations are at a post-Cold War low. Both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have said, however, that they want to improve ties between the two nuclear powers.

Facebook disclosed in September that Russians under fake names had used the social network to try to influence U.S. voters in the months before and after the 2016 election, writing about divisive issues, setting up events and buying ads.

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russian state operators ran the campaign combining fake social media posts and hacking into Democratic Party networks, eventually becoming an effort to help Republican candidate Trump, who scored a surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Over the past several months, the company has taken steps meant to reassure U.S. and European lawmakers that further regulation is unnecessary. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says the company has 20,000 people working to police and protect the site.

Costs associated with that effort are part of the reason Facebook said last week that it expects its profit margins to decline, a warning that sent shares tumbling about 25 percent, the biggest one-day loss of market cap in U.S. stock market history. Shares of Facebook were up about 1.5 percent in Tuesday’s midafternoon trading, part of a broader tech rebound. </s> All the IRA-related accounts have been suspended and the company is sharing information about them with congressional investigators who are reviewing potential manipulation in the 2016 election. During the time period Twitter investigated, the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, about 8.4 per cent of which were election-related.

The social media company said it’s emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the U.S. who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a tweet from these accounts during the election period, according to a blog post Friday. That’s almost 1 per cent of Twitter’s 69 million monthly active users in the U.S. The new IRA accounts are in addition to 2,752 accounts Twitter found and disclosed last year.

Twitter Inc. said it found another 1,062 accounts linked to the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency accused of trying to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook, Twitter defend their security measures as more signs of Russian election activity emerge

Russian ‘trolls’ spread propaganda on Instagram as platform flies under the radar

“After the 2016 election, we launched our Information Quality initiative to further develop strategies to detect and prevent bad actors from abusing our platform,” the company said in the post. “We have since made significant improvements, while recognizing that we have more to do as these patterns of activity develop and shift over time.”

Twitter also said its second assessment found another 13,512 Russian-linked automated accounts, for a total of 50,258, that tweeted election-related content during the 10 weeks before the 2016 election. Last year, when Twitter first disclosed the existence of these accounts, the company said the bots were responsible for about 1.4 million automated, election-related tweets.

Lawmakers have sharply criticized the social media companies for taking too long to recognize the seriousness of the Russian attempts to sow discord among U.S. voters. Twitter said that in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections it would verify major party candidates for all statewide and federal offices, with open “lines of communication” to federal and state officials. The company has also banned Russian state media accounts from buying ads and is creating a “transparency centre” to show how much political campaigns spend on advertising, the identity of the organization funding the campaign, and what demographics the ads targeted.

Twitter’s announcement Friday comes after Facebook Inc. said it would show people which Russian propaganda pages or accounts they had followed and liked on the social network.
Facebook announces that it has suspended 32 accounts it believes intended to influence the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States. The company says while it is uncertain who operated these accounts, at least one is linked to the Russian-based Internet Research Agency.