Top U.S. social networks
remain the target of government-led misinformation specialists around the world.
In separate announcements, both Facebook and Twitter say they have uncovered additional efforts to flood their
platforms with false information.
Facebook said it just removed 783 Pages, groups and accounts for engaging in what it’s calling “coordinated inauthentic behavior” tied
to Iran.
Specifically, the tech titan detected 262 Pages, 356 accounts, and three groups on Facebook, as well as 162 accounts on Instagram. Altogether, about 2 million accounts followed at
least one of these Pages, about 1,600 accounts joined at least one of these groups, and more than 254,000 accounts followed at least one of these Instagram accounts.
“There were multiple
sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico,
Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, US, and Yemen,” Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, notes in a new blog
post.
In most cases, the Page administrators and account owners in question represented themselves as locals, used fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events.
This
included commentary that repurposed Iranian state media’s reporting on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia and
Russia.
In a broader view of activity throughout 2018 -- and related to the U.S. midterm elections specifically -- Twitter said it spotted “limited operations that have the potential to
be connected to sources within Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.”
“The majority of these accounts were proactively suspended in advance of Election Day, due to the increasingly robust
nature of our technology and internal tooling for identifying platform manipulation,” Carlos Monje Jr., head of public policy, Twitter, stated.
In total, Twitter said more than 99
million tweets were sent from the first primaries in March through Election Day, last year.