Facebook announced Tuesday that it had removed more than 650 pages, groups, and accounts for what the social media giant termed “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that originated in Iran.
The company also said that, unrelated to the Iran activity, it had removed pages, groups, and accounts “linked to sources the US government has previously identified as Russian military intelligence services.”
The Iran-related activity, according to Facebook’s announcement, involved three sets of pages, accounts, and groups dating back as far as 2011.
The company said cybersecurity firm FireEye tipped the social network off in July about a network of Facebook pages and accounts on other services that primarily posted political content focused on the Middle East, as well as the U.K., U.S., and Latin America, starting in 2013 that Facebook was able to link to Iranian state media. Facebook then discovered a set of pages, started in 2016, pretending to be news organizations that tried to hack people’s accounts and spread malware, which in turn led to a third set of pages and accounts starting from 2011 that shared content about Middle East politics in Arabic and Farsi as well as content about politics in the U.K. and U.S. in English.
Nearly 1 million Facebook accounts had engaged with one of the Iran-linked pages or groups, and nearly 60,000 with associated Instagram accounts.
The activity of the Russia-linked groups and pages focused on politics in Syria and Ukraine, according to the announcement. While unrelated to the Iran-related activity, the two campaigns “used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” the announcement states.
“We ban this kind of behavior because we want people to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook. And while we’re making progress rooting out this abuse, as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing challenge because the people responsible are determined and well funded,” the announcement reads. The company said it is working with U.S. law enforcement on the ongoing investigation, shared information with U.K. law enforcement and briefed the U.S. Treasury and State Departments.
Twitter also announced it had suspended hundreds of accounts for what the service described as “engaging in coordinated manipulation.”
Working with our industry peers today, we have suspended 284 accounts from Twitter for engaging in coordinated manipulation. Based on our existing analysis, it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) August 22, 2018
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement noting that the action is “further evidence that foreign adversaries are actively using social media to divide Americans and undermine our democratic institutions.
“I’ve been saying for months that there’s no way the problem of social media manipulation is limited to a single troll farm in St. Petersburg, and that fact is now beyond a doubt. We also learned today that the Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook from 2016,” he said in the statement. “While I’m encouraged to see Facebook taking steps to rid their platforms of these bad actors, there’s clearly more work to be done.”
Facebook, Twitter, and Google are set to appear before the committee to discuss social media manipulation on Sept. 5.
[Disclaimer]
