• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, September 1, 2020

Facebook has removed a still-small network of accounts and pages linked to Russian operatives, around a site masquerading as independent news and using unwitting journalists.

Key goals appear to have included targeting left-leaning voters to turn them against the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris presidential ticket, as well as stirring divisiveness in the United States, according to one analyst report.

Twitter also suspended five accounts related to the site, calling them "Russian state actors."

Facebook posted a short item about removing the network on its blog on Tuesday: “We removed a small network of 13 Facebook accounts and two Pages linked to individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). This activity focused primarily on the US, UK, Algeria and Egypt, in addition to other English-speaking countries and countries in the Middle East and North Africa. We began this investigation based on information about this network’s off-platform activity from the FBI. Our internal investigation revealed the full scope of this network on Facebook.”

The IRA is a troll farm that was among 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities indicted by a U.S. grand jury in February 2018 on charges of violating criminal laws with intent to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election and political processes.

The IRA’s newly uncovered attack was in its infancy stages, Facebook told The Washington Post.

“The actions emerged as a result of a tip from the FBI and was one of a dozen operations tied to the [IRA] or individuals affiliated with it,” the Post reports. Facebook “has taken on roughly a dozen IRA-affiliated operations since the last presidential election, when IRA-backed pages amassed millions of views on the platform. The pages had about 14,000 followers.”

The Russians created fictitious personas on Facebook to direct people to a new site called Peace Data [shown above] that calls itself a “global news organization” dedicated to covering issues such as corruption, environmental crisis, abuse of power, armed conflicts, activism, and human rights, according to the Post.

The personas created used AI-generated profile pictures and maintained a presence across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, “in an apparent attempt to appear more convincing,” states a report by Graphika, a firm that analyzed the data at Facebook’s request.

“This is the first time we have observed known IRA-linked accounts use AI-generated avatars," it states. "However, the website employed real and apparently unwitting individuals, typically novice freelance writers, to write its articles. Between February and August 2020, it published over 500 articles in English and over 200 articles in Arabic, some of them original, others copied from a range of sources.” 

The operation targeted left-leaning voters, “with pinpoint precision” — particularly "Democratic Socialists, environmentalists and disgruntled Democrats in the U.S." — in efforts to discredit centrist Democrats, says the report.

Relatively few posts dealt primarily with the U.S. election or candidates, many articles had no direct relation to U.S. domestic politics, and some content was critical of Trump as well as Biden. But the overall approach "suggests an attempt to build a left-wing audience and steer it away from Biden’s campaign, in the same way that the original IRA tried to depress progressive and minority support for Hillary Clinton in 2016,” the report concludes. 

The site also “presented the U.S. as war-mongering and law-breaking abroad while being wracked by racism, COVID-19, and cutthroat capitalism at home.” 

It "paid particular attention to racial and political tensions. This included substantial coverage of the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd and criticism of both President Donald Trump and his challengers [Biden and Harris]. The English-language content on Biden and Harris was noteworthy for its hostile tone. One article by a guest writer accused the pair of 'submission to right-wing populism [...] as much about preserving careers as it is winning votes.'”