Ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, social media giant Facebook said it removed more than 100 accounts that could have been involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
In a statement late Monday, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the company has so far identified 115 accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “may be linked to foreign entities.”
They include 30 Facebook accounts, mostly in Russian and French, and 85 more mostly-in-English Instagram accounts.
“Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly,” Gleicher said. “But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the U.S., we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today.”
Last month, Facebook removed more than 800 pages and accounts the company said have “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook and other social media companies have been fighting to prevent foreign disinformation across their platforms in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, when efforts to influence voter sentiment were revealed.
Tuesday’s election, described by both politicians and news commentators as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency, will be a ‘real test’ of the safeguards Facebook has set up, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said last week. Those include setting up a war room at its headquarters and revealing more information about the identities of users posting political ads.
The platform has also taken down millions of pieces of inauthentic content, uncovering election-interference attempts from both Russia and Iran.
Facebook announced its war room — a command center to assess cybersecurity threats and platform misuse and make real-time decisions on how best to respond — in September.
It disabled a total of 1.3 billion accounts between October 2017 and March, mirroring efforts at Twitter and Google’s YouTube, and reported taking down 82 accounts and pages linked to Iran in late October.
Gleicher said in his statement that Facebook is looking into whether the latest disabled accounts are linked to the Russia-backed Internet Research Agency.
The troll farm has figured into indictments in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
On Monday, in a joint statement with the Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, and director of national intelligence, the FBI said that the agencies had “no indication of compromise of our nation’s election infrastructure that would prevent voting, change vote counts, or disrupt the ability to tally votes.”
“But Americans should be aware that foreign actors — and Russia in particular — continue to try to influence public sentiment and voter perceptions through actions intended to sow discord,” the agencies said. “They can do this by spreading false information about political processes and candidates, lying about their own interference activities, disseminating propaganda on social media, and through other tactics.”
