600,000 US Instagram users followed suspected Russian trolls before midterms

Win
McNamee/Getty Images

• Over 600,000 Americans followed Instagram accounts that
  are now believed to be run by Russian trolls.
• Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, deleted them just
  days before the 2018 midterms.
• The action came after the company was tipped off by the
  FBI.

Over 600,000 Americans followed a series of fake Instagram and
Facebook accounts suspected to be linked to Russia that were
detected and removed just days before the 2018 midterms. 

 On November 5 — the eve of the contentious midterm
elections that saw Democrats take control of the House of
Representatives — Facebook announced it had been informed by the
FBI about “online activity that they belied was linked to foreign
entities,” and subsequently took down dozens of accounts and
pages. 

In an update on Tuesday, Facebook said it has now taken down 99
Instagram accounts, 36 Facebook accounts, and 6 Facebook Pages.
1.25 million Facebook users followed at least one of the
Instagram accounts — and 600,000 of these users were in the
United States. 

Like previous influence campaigns, the various accounts and pages
posted politically divisive content, from both left-wing and
right-wing perspectives, according to samples provided by
Facebook. 

One
of the Instagram posts, promoting pro-Trump hashtags including
#maga.
Facebook

In a blog
post, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel
Gleicher said the accounts may be linked to Russia, which has
repeatedly tried to spread misinformation and propaganda on the
company’s social networks — most notably during the 2016 US
presidential election.

“Last Tuesday, a website claiming to be associated with the
Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based troll farm, published a
list of Instagram accounts they said that they’d created. We had
already blocked most of them, and based on our internal
investigation, we blocked the rest,” Gleicher wrote.

“Ultimately, this effort may have been connected to the IRA, but
we aren’t best placed to say definitively whether that is the
case. As multiple independent experts have pointed out, trolls
have an incentive to claim that their activities are more
widespread and influential than may be the case. That appears to
be true here as well.”

Another
of the accounts promoted pro-LGBTQ content.
Facebook

The takedowns are illustrative of the ongoing struggle Facebook
faces to protect its platform from covert political influence
campaigns — with everyone from Iran-linked operatives to
political activists at home in the US attempting to game the
system in recent months, according to Facebook’s past
announcements.

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