Facebook removes Russian accounts operating in the Former Soviet Union

The Russian trolls have been busy.

Facebook said in a blog post published Thursday that it has removed over 500 Facebook accounts, pages, and Instagram profiles linked to Russia for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” That means misrepresenting the true identity of the accounts, and using social media to exert influence on others.

Russian state-linked news organizations created the fake accounts, and they operated between 2013 and the present, mostly in Eastern Europe, with one network of pages specifically working in Ukraine. Some of the networks used methods akin to the Internet Research Agency, the organization indicted by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller II for attempting to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

“Today we removed multiple Pages, groups and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram,” Facebook wrote. “They used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing.”

The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) posted an in depth look from the open source data of the take down operation here. What’s notable is that the group behind the pages operating in Former Soviet Union (FSU) states is linked to Sputnik — a branch of the Russian state’s news organization, Rossiya Segodnya. The Internet Research Agency, by contrast, was not officially linked to the Russian government, though it did have deep ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration.

Other experts point out on Twitter that Facebook’s actions now — on accounts that have been operating since 2013 — show both a misunderstanding of Russian priorities and negligence in the region.

Since Facebook came under fire in the press and before Congress for its networks, including Instagram, being the vehicle of choice for Russian cyber-espionage, it has been purging fake accounts. In October, it removed about 800 pages that were misrepresenting their identity operating in the US.

The first network of accounts in Thursday’s purge operated in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries. They masqueraded as “general interest” profiles, like pages about sports or even the weather. But they were linked to a Moscow state news agency called Sputnik. And posted content spreading “anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption.”

The DFR Lab characterizes the pages’ purpose as spreading Russian reach and influence in these countries.

“Overall, the network’s main effect was to promote Rossiya Segodnya content,” the DFR Lab writes. “Its secondary effect was to amplify Kremlin messaging on certain political themes.”

Russian correspondent Andrew Roth explained on Twitter that Russia’s activities show how it maintains an ongoing interest in FSU states.

The second network operated specifically in Ukraine, where Russia has been embroiled in geo-political conflict since it annexed the Ukrainian state of Crimea in 2014.

“The individuals behind these accounts primarily represented themselves as Ukrainian, and they operated a variety of fake accounts while sharing local Ukrainian news stories on a variety of topics, such as weather, protests, NATO, and health conditions at schools,” Facebook wrote.

The first network of accounts operating throughout Europe and Asia did not use Instagram. The network operating in Ukraine did. Both spent money on advertising.

Facebook emphasized that its investigation to find and root out disingenuous activity on its platform is ongoing. 

“While we are 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,” Facebook wrote.

To that end, the company says it is working with the government, journalists, and researchers to do better. The problem is that it is only now extricating a problem of coordinated platform exploitation that has been going on for years.