Facebook announced Tuesday it found and removed more accounts secretly controlled by a Russian troll farm.
In a blog post, the social media giant announced 138 Facebook pages, 70 Facebook accounts, and 65 Instagram accounts that were controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and were removed Tuesday morning.
Facebook said most of the pages were in Russian and targeted people living in Russia or Russian-speakers around the world including from neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.
The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the start of 2015.
“Most of our actions against the IRA to date have been to prevent them from interfering in foreign elections. This update is about taking down their pages targeting people living in Russia. This Russian agency has repeatedly acted deceptively and tried to manipulate people in the US, Europe, and Russia — and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere in the world,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in a statement.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said the IRA used “inauthentic accounts to deceive and manipulate people […] before, during and after the 2016 US presidential elections.”
“It’s why we don’t want them on Facebook. We removed this latest set of pages and accounts solely because they were controlled by the IRA — not based on the content,” Stamos said.
Facebook has faced increasing scrutiny after it was revealed data research firm Cambridge Analytica improperly took the information of more than 50 million users.
The Internet Research Agency, which is based in St. Petersburg, was identified by the U.S. intelligence committee in early 2017 as a troll farm financed by an ally of Russian President Vladmir Putin.
This year, special counsel Robert Mueller unveiled indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities. Ten of the defendants were allegedly employed by the IRA.
“Defendants, posing as US persons and creating false US personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract US audiences,” the February indictment read. “They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”
