Facebook IDs new fake influence campaign
“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 (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that’s ever done,” the company said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon,” Facebook said in a statement Tuesday.
The removed pages had more than 290,000 followers, the company said. The most followed Facebook pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”
The company said the pages ran 150 ads for a total of approximately $11,000. The ads were paid for in US and Canadian dollars, the company added. In 2016, the Internet Research Agency had purchased ads targeting Americans using rubles.
Next week’s event was not the only event the pages created. The pages created about 30 events since May 2017 and “The largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users said that they would attend,” Facebook said.
[Facebook’s] action marked the social media giant’s first significant acknowledgment of an ongoing, coordinated propaganda campaign on its site since it implemented new safeguards after the 2016 vote.
The Committee to Investigate Russia notes that the Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning at 9:30am ET titled, “Open Hearing: Foreign Influence Operations and their use of Social Media Platforms”
Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Virginia) tweeted: I’m glad Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint & address this activity. I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future.”
House Intel Committee top Democrat Adam Schiff (D-California) told NBC News: “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 platform to influence the U.S. electorate.”
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) tweeted: “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, it’s what we’ve said for some time that this was much more pervasive and ongoing than either the companies understood. Now they’re beginning to understand it and we’ll wait to see how they react to it.”
More from Rep. Schiff:
“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. Foreign influence actors remain readily capable of manipulating raw emotion and societal divisions to prey on unsuspecting Americans who use these same social media tools for legitimate political expression, organization, and advocacy.
“Facebook must continue proactively identifying these actors, notifying Congress and law enforcement, and taking necessary steps to remove the foreign influence content and to notify legitimate Facebook users who fell victim to the same covert tradecraft that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed through the 2016 election.
“It is clear that much more work needs to be done before the midterm elections to harden our defenses, because foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016 — dividing us along political and ideological lines, to the detriment of our cherished democratic system. As DNI Coats said earlier this month, the warning lights are blinking red as we approach the 2018 midterms.”
More from Senator Burr via The Hill:
On Tuesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee chairman, told The Hill that his staff had been briefed on Facebook’s findings.
“I’m not sure that this will be the last finding that they come with,” Burr said.
