The Russia connectionFacebook IDs new fake influence campaign

Published 1 August 2018

As the U.S. midterm election nears, the Kremlin is intensifying its disinformation and hacking campaign to help bring an outcome in the November election which would be favorable to Russia – as it did in the 2016 presidential election. Facebook on Tuesday announced it has identified a new ongoing political influence campaign and has removed more than thirty fake accounts and pages.

As the U.S. midterm election nears, the Kremlin is intensifying its disinformation and hacking campaign to help bring an outcome in the November election which would be favorable to Russia – as it did successfully in 2016. Facebook on Tuesday announced it has identified a new ongoing political influence campaign and has removed more than thirty fake accounts and pages.

NYT

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference. 

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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. Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency … 

CNN

Publicly, Facebook is saying it does not know for sure who was behind the network, but is saying it has “found evidence of some connections between these accounts” and accounts that had been run by Russian trolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The company also said it had reported the network to law enforcement and to Congress.

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Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a post that the company was still investigating where the pages were run from but that, “Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections.” (The IRA is the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll group that has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on charges related to an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.) 

He cautioned, “But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.”