Facebook on Monday disclosed that it had taken down four new foreign interference operations originating from Iran and Russia, including one targeting next year’s US presidential election that appears to be linked to Russian troll agency the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Facebook cybersecurity policy head Nathaniel Gleicher said in a blog post that the suspected IRA campaign “had the hallmarks of a well-resourced operation that took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location.”
The campaign used 50 Instagram accounts and one Facebook account with about 246,000 followers to publish nearly 75,000 posts, said Graphika, a social network analysis company that reviewed the campaign for Facebook.
The accounts adopted various political identities, such as pro-US President Donald Trump, anti-police violence, pro-US Senator Bernie Sanders, LGBTQ, feminist, pro-police and pro-Confederate, Graphika said in a report.
Most posts were not explicitly related to electoral politics, but were focused on general political commentary for “persona development and branding,” it said.
The deployment of false personas advocating for both sides of a political debate — such as nine accounts designed to look like they were run by black activists protesting against police violence and “thin blue line” accounts defending police officers — echoed the tactics used by the IRA during its interference campaign in the 2016 US presidential election, it added.
The accounts primarily reshared memes or content created by authentic US social media users, Graphika said, such as screenshots of viral tweets or reposts of memes by the conservative group Turning Point USA.
The campaign might have been recycling authentic US content in an attempt to conceal its origins, Graphika said, but added that it still detected certain linguistic tics that suggested a foreign origin.
An overreliance on content referencing 1980s US TV show The Dukes of Hazzard was another hint at IRA origins, the report said.
Although most of the posts were focused on polarizing political issues, some specifically addressed next year’s election, it said.
The fake “black activist” accounts primarily posted in support of Sanders and against Senator Kamala Harris, with some also attacking former US vice president Joe Biden, the report said.
“It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides,” Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo told CNN.
The other three foreign influence operations disclosed by Facebook originated from Iran.
One targeted audiences in the US and in francophone north Africa with content related to Israel, Palestine and Yemen.
A second focused on Latin American countries with repurposed Iranian state media articles appearing to come from local news outlets.
A third small network of accounts from Iran targeted the US with content from a page called BLMNews that appears to have been masquerading as a news outlet connected to the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Facebook also announced several initiatives designed to prevent foreign election interference in next year’s presidential contest.
“Elections have changed significantly since 2016, and Facebook has changed too,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with reporters.
The company has learned after being caught on its “back foot” in 2016 and has been proactively preparing for elections, he said.
The company is launching a program to help secure the accounts of elected officials and tightening its rules for disclosing who controls a page.
It would also begin labeling content from state-controlled media outlets and more prominently label posts that have been rated false by its third-party fact-checking program.
Facebook is also to ban political ads designed to suppress voter turnout, including ads that suggest voting is “useless” or that recommend people not vote. This policy is to apply to all accounts.
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