Twitter has identified and removed nearly 6,000 accounts that it said were part of a coordinated effort by Saudi Arabian government agencies and individuals to advance the country’s geopolitical interests.
Separately, Facebook said that it removed hundreds of Facebook accounts, groups and pages linked to inauthentic behavior from two separate groups, one originating in the country of Georgia and one in Vietnam, which targeted people both in Vietnam and in the US.
Some of the accounts used profile photographs generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and masqueraded as Americans, Facebook said.
It is one of the first such misinformation efforts to use material generated by AI.
Tech companies have stepped up efforts to tackle misinformation on their services ahead of next year’s US presidential elections. The efforts followed revelations that Russians bankrolled thousands of fake political ads during the 2016 elections to sow dissent among Americans.
Twitter’s and Facebook’s announcements underscore the fact that misinformation concerns are not limited to the US and Russia.
In a blog post on Friday, Twitter said that the removed Saudi Arabian accounts were amplifying messages favorable to Saudi Arabian authorities, mainly through “aggressive liking, retweeting and replying.”
While the majority of the content was in Arabic, Twitter said that the tweets also amplified discussions about sanctions in Iran and appearances by Saudi Arabian government officials in Western media.
Last year, Twitter began archiving tweets and media it deems to be associated with known state-backed information operations. In August, it closed 200,000 Chinese accounts that targeted protests in Hong Kong.
The 5,929 accounts removed and added to the archives are part of a larger group of 88,000 accounts engaged in “spammy behavior” across a wide range of topics, but Twitter is not disclosing all of them, because some might be legitimate accounts taken over through hacking.
The Twitter accounts were linked to a social media marketing firm in Saudi Arabia called Smaat that managed many government departments in Saudi Arabia. The accounts used third-party automated tools to amplify non-political content at high volumes.
“It’s really clear we have to do something about it,” said University of Texas at Austin professor Samuel Woolley, who studies disinformation. “It can’t just be after the fact. We have to get better about detecting in real time.”
Facebook said that the Georgia group targeted domestic audiences and the Vietnam group focused mainly in the US, as well as Vietnamese, Spanish and Chinese-speaking audiences around the world.
The groups created networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing, the company said, adding that to evade detection, the groups used a combination of fake and real accounts.
“We are making progress rooting out this abuse, but as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing challenge,” Facebook Cybersecurity Policy head Nathaniel Gleicher wrote in a blog post.
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