Facebook bans hundreds of US accounts for coordianted influence campaign

Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zach Gibson/Getty
Images

Americans are taking a page out of Russia’s playbook.

Malicious Facebook users are creating hundreds of fake
accounts and profiles in attempts to influence users politically,

Facebook said in a blog post on Thursday.

The Silicon Valley social networking firm has announced a
crackdown on the accounts, removing 559 pages and 251 accounts
“that have consistently broken our rules against spam and
coordinated inauthentic behaviour.” Facebook did not cite
the source of these accounts,
but The New York Times reports that they were run by
Americans. 

“Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with
the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a
network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites,”
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity Nathaniel Gliecher wrote.

“Many used the same techniques to make their content appear
more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms
using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were
forums for legitimate political debate.”

The activity echoes the actions of Russia during the 2016 US
election, when it attempted to influence American politics using
a coordinated campaign of fake accounts that spread hoaxes and
misleading information.

This story is developing…

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1
(650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at
rprice@businessinsider.com, WeChat at robaeprice,
or 
Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by
email only, please.) Yo
u can
also contact
Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.