Facebook Removes Accounts Tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency
September 01 2020 - 6:28PM
Dow Jones News
By Sarah E. Needleman
Facebook Inc. took down recently created accounts and pages
linked to a Russian group that U.S. authorities have accused of
interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the social-media
giant said Tuesday.
The detection of the operation ahead of November elections show
that the Internet Research Agency, a "troll farm" indicted by
federal authorities in 2018, remains a thorn in Facebook's side.
But the company said the recent effort's small reach -- totaling 13
accounts and two pages -- shows Facebook is getting better at
detecting foreign political manipulation efforts before such
content spreads widely.
Facebook revealed the takedown in a report Tuesday, the latest
of several efforts to improve the quality of its platforms.
Assisting in the effort was Graphika, an independent research firm
that contracts with Facebook on investigations into foreign
social-media manipulation.
The Russian-led networks were less significant than the IRA's
past efforts to sow discord on Facebook, said Nathaniel Gleicher,
Facebook's head of security, during a conference call with
journalists. "Their operational security has improved, but their
impact is getting smaller," he said. "For all their increased
efforts, they're not being terribly successful."
Mr. Gleicher said the Russian group used English but largely
targeted foreign audiences and had a small following. It failed to
get Facebook's approval to run U.S. ads, he said. Much of its
efforts were tied to a website called PeaceData.net, for which the
IRA allegedly tried to recruit freelance journalists as
writers.
The U.S. intelligence community has determined Moscow interfered
in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump win the
White House, and officials warned last month of a broad Russian
effort to damage Democratic nominee Joe Biden's bid for the
presidency this year. Russia has denied interfering in American
elections. The Russian embassy in Washington didn't immediately
respond to a request for comment on Facebook's announcement.
Facebook was among several U.S. tech giants criticized in a
report released last year by the U.S. Senate committee for helping
to spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign.
More recently Facebook has been under fire from civil-rights
advocates that allege the company has done too little to police
hateful and other problematic content. In July groups including the
Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP enlisted hundreds of companies
to halt spending on Facebook's platforms to pressure it to do
more.
Facebook has acknowledged some shortcomings and pointed to new
policies, additional spending and other efforts to address the
groups' concerns. The company has said it has more than 35,000
people working on safety and security -- many with expertise in law
enforcement, national security, counterterrorism intelligence and
academic research in radicalization.
In the new report, Facebook said it removed three large networks
of accounts, Pages and Groups for engaging in coordinated
inauthentic behavior, bringing the total number of networks it has
removed since 2017 to more than 100. The first network it removed
was from the IRA and so was the latest, the company said, adding
that overall it has identified about a dozen deceptive campaigns
associated with the Russian organization alone.
Facebook said it began looking into the IRA after receiving
information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "We consider
strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, which includes
sharing threat indicators, to be critically important in combating
malign foreign influence actors," an FBI spokeswoman said.
Facebook said in its report that each takedown makes it more
difficult for manipulators to thrive on its platforms. A spokesman
for the company declined to comment further.
--Jeff Horwitz and Dustin Volz contributed to this article.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 01, 2020 19:13 ET (23:13 GMT)
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