Facebook bans accounts suspected of meddling in US midterms
Facebook has announced it has removed a number of accounts and pages that could have been created to disrupt the American mid-term elections.
Facebook announced the removal of 32 accounts and pages that the site claimed showed signs of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, which between them had published thousands of posts that had been promoting American political stances, many of which were reported to be anti-Trump.
Facebook deleted the posts and accounts believing they were designed to meddle in and disrupt the upcoming midterm elections that are happening across the United States in November, where 35 senate seats will be contested along with the entire US House of Representatives. Other states and local elections will also take place.
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Such posts were attempting to push specific political stances, and also arranging events such as a protest to the Unite the Right movement. Popular pages that were removde include “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”
Worryingly, Facebook reported that whoever created the accounts went to much greater lengths to disguise their true identities than they did in the lead up to the Presidential elections in 2016, this time hiding behind technologies such as virtual privacy networks designed to create anonymity.
Such bad actors were also using third party entities to create sponsored adverts in a bid to make the adverts look legitimate and prevent Facebook from discovering the true identities of the people behind them.
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While Facebook concluded that much of the misinformation circulating their platform leading up to the 2016 Presidential elections was directly linked to Russia (meddling that reached well over 100 million Americans) a lot more doubt remains as to who is responsible for this latest attempt at US political meddling. Many believe the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency may behind the accounts.
To Facebook’s credit, the social networking giant seems to have been much more pro-active in their investigations and actions in 2018 than they were in 2016, and the posts published by the now-deleted accounts appear to have reached far less people than two years ago.
But this is an on-going battle that is likely to be an important factor in all of America’s upcoming elections for the foreseeable future. Mark Zuckerberg previously told senators during a hearing that his site is in “an arms race” with Russian operators seeking to exploit his website, and “they’re going to keep getting better“.
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