Ahead of the November’s elections…Facebook has Shut Down about thirty accounts and pages that they call “inauthentic.” Veuer’s Sam Berman has the full story
Facebook has removed dozens of pages that were using “coordinated inauthentic behavior” intended to “mislead” other users ahead of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, the company announced today.
It’s the first known coordinated effort that Facebook has discovered and announced ahead of the midterms. The company says it’s unclear who is behind the efforts, but CNN reported Tuesday that it is believed a “Russian group” is behind the coordinated campaign.
“Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections,” Facebook wrote, referring to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the group that was most prevalent on Facebook around the 2016 election. Still, Facebook declined to name Russia outright.
The coordinated campaign included just 32 Pages and accounts on both Facebook and Instagram. Some of those Pages created events, shared thousands of posts, and even bought around $11,000 in Facebook ads over a 14-month period. That’s a small campaign compared to what we saw on Facebook during the U.S. election in 2016.
