After wiping out 652 fake accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" that originated in Iran and Russia, Facebook has now removed 80 more accounts for posting politically-charged memes.
San Fransico: Just after Facebook removed 652 fake accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" that originated in Iran and Russia and targeted people across multiple Internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, Britain and the US, in August, it has now taken down 82 more pages and accounts with standoffs to Iran. All these accounts were posting memes on politics.
More than a million users followed at least one of the accounts, which were live on both Facebook and Instagram accounts. According to Facebook, some of the fake pages, groups and accounts originated in Iran and some in Russia.
The recently-removed accounts were detected last week and spent less than $100 to advertise across the two platforms. The first advertisement had run in January 2016 and the second ran in January, 2018, Facebook said.
While some accounts were live from 2016, They turned most active in the past year, Facebook's head of cyber security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, told media.
The company earlier identified Russia and Iran as the source of potential state-sponsored campaigns. Gleicher also said that the company also found significant overlaps and links between the accounts removed in August and the accounts, which were removed on Friday.
Facebook has moderately limited the information it shares about actors or action, declining to assign motivation or provide information like how many people indicated they would attend one of the Facebook events hosted by the accounts, for instance.
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