Facebook deletes Iran-linked pages over effort to sow discord among US voters - “Our investigation is still in its early days”
Facebook deletes Iran-linked pages over effort to sow
discord among US voters
Dozens of accounts posting politically charged content
reached more than a million users, company says
By Gabrielle Canon Fri 26 Oct 2018 15.01 EDT
Facebook says the accounts posed as US and UK residents.
Photograph: Facebook
Facebook has uncovered and deleted dozens of accounts and
pages originating in Iran that were intended to provoke division in the US and
the UK.
The accounts, which posed as US and UK residents, posted
frequently about politically divisive subjects, including race relations,
opposition to Donald Trump, and immigration. More than a million Facebook users
had engaged with the 82 pages, groups and accounts that were identified, most
of them in the US, and Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity
policy, said they were created to deliberately “sow discord”.
“Our investigation is still in its early days,” said
Gleicher, in a press briefing on Friday morning, “and while we have found no
ties to the Iranian government, at this point we can’t say for sure who is
responsible.”
Seven events were also identified as part of the
campaign, but Gliecher did not provide any additional information about them,
including whether or not they actually took place. He said the team was still
investigating the details and that as they learned more they would release the
information. “Based on our analysis and what we have seen so far, the primary
focus of the operation was messaging through the large pages and it wasn’t as
focused on the events.”
He explained that teams working for Facebook’s newly
launched “war room” had identified “inauthentic behavior” from the accounts
late last week, and had alerted law enforcement agencies and researchers before
removing them.
He emphasized that, ahead of the 2018 midterms elections
in the US, their investigative teams were working hard to ensure the platform
is not used as a tool for foreign interference. “We work closely with the US
government, and we have been in contact with law enforcement, both with the
foreign influence taskforce at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security,”
he said, adding that the company’s war room is preparing to work with state
election officials if additional issues are uncovered in the coming weeks. “As
we lead into the final days before the midterms, our expectation is that they
will be seeing challenges.”
Twice over the summer, Facebook uncovered fake accounts
being used by foreign actors to affect American opinions. In July, the social
network removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram, with ties to
a Russian agency. A month later, Facebook removed 652 fake accounts and pages,
created as part of four separate campaigns, that were found to have ties to
both Russia and Iran.
Gleicher said the accounts taken down this week had some
overlap with those campaigns. The August accounts were originally flagged by
the cybersecurity company FireEye, which reported that the intent appeared to
be to engender support for Iran-focused US policies, and “to promote Iranian
political interests, including anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian
themes”.
The campaign revealed on Friday, which included accounts
that date back to 2016, was largely based around divisive topics in the US and
UK that could potentially sway opinions in the upcoming election.
Facebook’s war room was created to investigate these
types of activities, Gleicher said, and their teams of roughly 2,000 data
scientists, engineers, and investigators are now working closely with the
government, law enforcement, and security experts to detect fake accounts.
The social network has come under harsh scrutiny over
foreign actors’ attempts to use it to sway the results of the 2016 US election.
Last year, Facebook reported that roughly 126 million Americans may have
engaged with Russian-backed accounts, which posted divisive content and fake
news ahead of the election.
Since then, the company has ramped up efforts to find and
remove fake accounts, especially those with ties to foreign actors seeking to
interfere in elections. Critics have voiced concerns that the company is still
not doing enough to combat fake news and intentionally misleading accounts.
“We face smart, well-funded adversaries, who will never
give up, and who constantly change tactics as we improve,” Gleicher said. “We
will need to continue to invest heavily in safety and security, not only to
prevent election interference on Facebook, but also to protect the authenticity
of the connections and conversations across our services.”
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