Facebook Suspends Dozens Of Accounts Accused Of Sharing Politically Charged Content

Facebook has reportedly identified and suspended a number of pages, groups, and accounts, which originated in Iran, accused of sharing politically charged content intended to sow discord and division.

The social networking giant has taken down 30 pages, 33 accounts, and three groups on Facebook, and 16 accounts on Instagram, that were tied to the campaign, which it described as “inauthentic behavior.” The alleged accounts were spreading divisive political posts targeted at users in the US and the UK and had amassed about 1 million followers on the social network, about 25,000 Facebook accounts joined at least one of the groups and more than 28,000 accounts followed at least one of the Instagram accounts.

“Our threat intelligence team first detected this activity one week ago,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blog post on Friday. “Given the elections, we took action as soon as we’d completed our initial investigation and shared the information with US and UK government officials, US law enforcement, Congress, other technology companies and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.”

Gleicher, however, refused to confirm if the removed accounts or pages had any connection with the Iranian government.

As per the blog post, the pages and accounts also organized seven events. However, it remained unclear if those events were real-world events and if anyone attended those events.

Notably, back in August, Facebook had disrupted another Iranian influence campaign in which the groups posed as news organizations. There is “some overlap” between the two efforts, the company said.

Another interesting thing to note is that the people behind the alleged accounts had just spent less than $100 on ads on Facebook and Instagram. The first advertisement ran in June 2016 and the second in January 2018.