Facebook said it has identified and banned suspicious accounts that engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” some of which may be designed to influence the US midterm elections scheduled for November.
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It is unclear which organization or country is behind the campaign, although the Times reports that Facebook officials who briefed lawmakers this week said Russia may be involved. As for those behind the accounts and suspicious behavior, Facebook said in a call with reporters on Tuesday afternoon (US local time) that it did not have enough technical evidence to state who was behind the operation.
Facebook discovered activity designed to inflame tensions around divisive topics like the rise of white supremacy in America and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
In particular, Facebook found suspicious accounts engaging in coordinated activity around the #AbolishICE movement and a second “Unite the Right” meet-up of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, an organized protest that devolved into violence and resulted in the murder of counter-protestor Heather Heyer.
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In the call with reporters, Facebook executives declined to say whether the activity was definitively aimed at influenced midterm election outcomes. Rather, it “focused on a range of activities,” according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy.
But the company felt the need to disclose the findings to lawmakers and the public ahead of a scheduled August 10th left-wing protest in Washington, DC that was coordinated by one of the inauthentic accounts and related to the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” protest.
Facebook says it shut the event down and contacted the five other authentic administrators who were enlisted to help run the event to inform them of the situation. More than 600 users said they would attend the event, while more than 2,600 users listed themselves as “interested.” Facebook intends to every one of those users about what happened.
Facebook published a series of blog posts outlining its removal of 32 pages and accounts and from the main Facebook app and Instagram that were “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The company’s posts do not mention election interference or influence. They do, however, lay out the potential ties to advanced state-sponsored actors.
“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that’s ever done. We face determined, well-funded adversaries who will never give up and are constantly changing tactics. It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too. It’s why we’re investing heavily in more people and better technology to prevent bad actors misusing Facebook — as well as working much more closely with law enforcement and other tech companies to better understand the threats we face,” Facebook said.
Gleicher says the company identified eight Pages, 17 profiles, and seven Instagram accounts. Around 290,000 people followed at least one of the Pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017. More than 9,500 organic posts were created by these Pages and accounts, and $11,000 were spent to run 150 ads between April of last year and June 2018. The Pages also created 30 events on Facebook, some of which racked up thousands of confirmed attendees. It’s unclear if the events ever occurred or if the intention was to simply gauge interest in real-world meet-ups around certain topics.
After the briefing the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to his personal page following the briefing, writing publicly that “security isn’t a problem that you ever completely solve,” and echoing statements from other executives that the company is engaged in an arms race with bad actors looking to misuse the platform.
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