Image copyright Getty Images/Facebook

Facebook says it has removed 32 accounts and pages believed to have been set up to influence the mid-term US elections in November.

It said it was in the "very early" stages of the investigation and did not yet know who was behind the pages.

It said the creators had gone to greater lengths to hide their identities than a Russia-based campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential vote.

It described attempts to erase election interference as an "arms race."

What did Facebook discover?

The social network said in a blog that it had identified 17 suspect profiles on Facebook and seven Instagram accounts.

It said that there were more than 9,500 Facebook posts created by the accounts and one piece of content on Instagram.

Image copyright Facebook Image caption Facebook has shared some of the images posted by the accounts

In total more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages involved, it added.

Facebook said the suspect accounts had also run about 150 ads on Facebook and Instagram, costing a total of $11,000 (£8,300).

The most popular fake accounts were:

Aztlan Warriors

Black Elevation

Mindful Being

Resisters

Why can't Facebook be sure who is responsible?

The "bad actors" went to far greater lengths to cover their tracks than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) had in the past, Facebook said.

This included using virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their location, and using third parties to run ads on their behalf.

Furthermore, the social network said it had not found evidence of Russian IP (internet protocol) addresses.

But it did find one link between the IRA and the new accounts. One of disabled IRA accounts shared a Facebook event hosted by the Resisters page. The page also briefly listed an IRA account as one of its administrators.

Image copyright Facebook Image caption Many of the posts included anti-Trump messages

It added that it "may never be able to identify the source" for the fake accounts.

"The set of actors we see now might be the IRA with improved capabilities, or it could be a separate group," explained Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos.

"This is one of the fundamental limitations of attribution: offensive organisations improve their techniques once they have been uncovered, and it is wishful thinking to believe that we will always be able to identify persistent actors with high confidence."

What is the company doing about it?

Facebook has removed the suspect accounts, but says other legitimate page administrators unwittingly interacted with them.

For example, after the Resisters account created a Facebook event for a protest on 10 to 12 August called "No Unite the Right 2", five other page owners offered to co-host the demonstration and posted details about transportation and locations.

Facebook said it had contacted the admins involved and would alert the 2,600 users who had expressed interest in the event.

Image copyright Facebook Image caption Some of the flagged posts would have been difficult for the public to identify as election interference

The firm said it would also continue efforts to detect further misuses of its platform and work more closely with law enforcement and other tech firms to understand the threats faced.

How have US politicians reacted?

Democratic congressman Adam Schiff said: "Today's announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we've long feared: that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously-identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponise social media platforms to influence the US electorate."

Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who is vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also pointed his finger at Moscow.

"Today's disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity," he said.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham added that he intended to pursue retaliatory measures by introducing a sanctions bill against Russia on Thursday "that has everything but the kitchen sink in it".

"It'll be the sanctions bill from hell. And any other country that is trying to interfere with our election should suffer the same fate."

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, said that the operation's apparent goal had been to "sow discord, distrust, and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system".

"Russians want a weak America," he added.

Analysis: Dave Lee, North America technology reporter

Image copyright Getty Images

This may look like another disastrous headline for Facebook, but it isn't.

Earlier in the year it promised to improve its so-far shambolic efforts at removing misinformation. It promised to hire more people, enlist outside help and work on new automated detection methods.

Today it was able to share a tangible, politician-friendly example of how those efforts came together, to quash a misinformation campaign before it apparently caused much harm.

But the future is troubling and predictable. This latest campaign was more sophisticated than anything that came before it - the use of third parties to buy advertising in the US is a difficult problem for Facebook to tackle without snarling up its ads operation.

And to state the obvious, while Facebook was able to detect this specific operation, none of us really know how big this problem is.

What happened with the 2016 elections?

Shortly after the vote, Facebook's chief Mark Zuckerberg derided suggestions that fake news posted to the platform had influenced the presidential election, saying it was a "pretty crazy idea".

But he has since apologised for being so dismissive.

In September 2017, Facebook acknowledged that Russians had indeed used fake identities to try to influence the US electorate before and after the election, and had posted comments, ads and details about street protests to achieve this.

US intelligence agencies have also concluded that Russian state operators used fake social media accounts in an attempt to interfere with the campaign.

President Putin has, however, denied that Russia meddled.</s>Los Angeles, Jul 31 (EFE).- Facebook announced Tuesday that it eliminated 32 accounts for what the company described as “coordinated inauthentic behavior” ahead of the mid-term US congressional elections in November.



“This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” Facebook said in a statement.



The social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg found itself at the center of controversy during the 2016 presidential election for the use of its platform to disseminate hoaxes and fake news.



“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts – including who may be behind this,”

Facebook acknowledged, while adding that “whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.”



IRA is accused by Facebook and the US Department of Justice of having played a key role in the campaign of hoaxes and fake news on controversial and divisive issues designed to try to influence the 2016 election in which Donald Trump won the White House.



In the current probe, the tech giant eliminated eight Facebook pages and 17 profiles, as well as seven Instagram accounts.



“In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017,” said Facebook.



Among the deleted pages was one called “Resisters,” which had created a Facebook Event – “No Unite the Right 2-DC” – a counterdemonstration to Unite the Right 2-DC, which had been called by the ultraright for Aug. 12 in Washington.</s>WASHINGTON: Facebook has removed 32 fake accounts and pages that it says were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and political influence campaign to manipulate voters ahead of the November mid-term elections in the US.

 Though the world’s biggest social media network has not yet attributed the accounts to any group, it says the campaign does bear some resemblance to the propaganda campaign allegedly run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.

 Facebook has been grappling with continuing public backlash for being slow to recognize Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, along with widespread concerns over its past data-sharing practices. The company’s stock has plunged more than 20 per cent since last week, after it reported slower user growth and rising costs for security and safety programs to crack down on abuse of its platform.

 “This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” it said.

Noting that Facebook is still in the very early stages of its investigation and does not have all the facts – including who may be behind this, the company executives warned that they were dealing with increasingly sophisticated political operatives, who are finding new ways to abuse Facebook’s platforms.

 “We’ve made it harder for inauthentic actors to operate on Facebook,” said Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. “Yet we face determined, well-funded adversaries who won’t give up and who are constantly changing tactics.”

 “At this point in our investigation, we do not have enough technical evidence to state definitively who is behind this,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy. However, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the US Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement tying the latest Facebook activity directly to Russia.

After its latest discovery, Facebook said it had removed 17 profiles and eight pages, along with seven accounts on Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app. The earliest was created in March of last year, while the most recent was created this May.

More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, which had names like Aztlan Warriors, Black Elevation, Mindful Being and Resisters, the company said. The organizers behind the accounts went to great lengths to conceal their identities including using virtual private networks software that masks the geographic location of computers and Internet-based phone numbers, company officials said.

 They also used third parties to publish paid advertisements on Facebook, in violation of the social-media firm’s policies banning foreign entities from buying US political ads. The accounts spent USD 11,000 to run 150 ads on both Facebook and Instagram between April 2017 and June of this year. Facebook previously said roughly 470 fake accounts had spent USD 100,000 on more than 3,500 ads surrounding the 2016 election. Facebook said it all started two weeks ago when it identified the first of eight pages and 17 profiles.

 The pages created about 30 events since May 2017. About half had fewer than 100 accounts interested in attending. The largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users said that they would attend, it said. One fake page called ‘Resisters’ was involved in co-coordinating a protest in Washington between August 10-12. The ‘No Unite the Right 2 DC’ event was meant to be a counter-protest to a rally planned by right-wing groups as a follow-up to last year’s deadly ‘Unite the Right’ protests in Charlottesville.

 Fake accounts contacted administrators of five other legitimate Facebook groups to help plan the counter protest, including offering support for transportation and logistics, and posting ads to hire an event co-coordinator. Facebook said it had disabled the event and was in the process of contacting nearly 2,600 people who had said they were interested in attending.

“These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions we’ve taken to prevent abuse over the past year,” Facebook said. For example, they used virtual private networks (VPNs) and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. “We have found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here,” it said.

 After being caught flat-footed by the IRA’s efforts ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook has expanded its security team, hired counterterrorism experts and recruited workers with government security clearances. Facebook has deployed technology tools like artificial intelligence and thousands of people to work on security as the company’s “major focus” this year is to protect the integrity of upcoming elections in several countries, including India, on its platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said earlier. PTI</s>WASHINGTON: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Facebook said that the accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and first discovered two weeks ago. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, the company said.

Between April 2017 and June 2018, the accounts ran 150 ads costing $11,000 on the two platforms. They were paid for in American and Canadian dollars. And the pages created roughly 30 events over a similar time period, the largest of which attracted interest from 4,700 accounts.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency, but that the actors had better disguised their efforts, using VPNs, internet phone services and third parties to purchase ads for them. He said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses, like the ones sometimes used in the past by Internet Research Agency accounts. But there were also connections between some of the accounts and others tied to the notorious Russian troll farm that were taken down by Facebook already.

“These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions we’ve taken to prevent abuse over the past year,” Mr. Gleicher said.

The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity.

Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues.

Facebook discovered coordinated activity around issues like a sequel to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Specifically, a page called “Resisters,” which interacted with one Internet Research Agency account in 2017, created an event called “No Unite the Right 2 — DC” to serve as a counterprotest to the white nationalist gathering, scheduled to take place in Washington in August. Mr. Gleicher said “inauthentic” administrators for the “Resisters” page went as far as to coordinate with administrators for five other apparently real pages to co-host the event, publicizing details about transportation and other logistics.

Mr. Gleicher said it disabled the event on Tuesday and notified 2,600 users of the site who had indicated interest in attending the event.

Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, according to two people briefed on the findings. That echoed efforts in 2016 to fan division around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Democratic lawmakers said the disclosure only clarified what they have feared since the extent of Russian involvement in 2016 became clear more than a year ago.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has exerted intense pressure on the social media companies, praised Facebook on Tuesday for bringing the activity into the public but asked for its cooperation in updating laws to prevent influence campaigns.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” he said. “And I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity.”

After being caught flat-footed by the Internet Research Agency’s efforts to use social media to sow division ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook is trying to avoid a repeat disaster in 2018. The company has expanded its security team, hiring counterterrorism experts and recruiting workers with government security clearances.

The company is using artificial intelligence and teams of human reviewers to detect automated accounts and suspicious election-related activity. It has also tried to make it harder for Russian-style influence campaigns to use covert Facebook ads to sway public opinion, by requiring political advertisers in the United States to register with a domestic mailing address and by making all political ads visible in a public database.

On a conference call with reporters earlier this month, Mr. Gleicher declined to directly answer multiple questions about whether the company had detected additional Russian information campaigns.

“We know that Russians and other bad actors are going to continue to try to abuse our platform — before the midterms, probably during the midterms, after the midterms, and around other events and elections,” Mr. Gleicher said. “We are continually looking for that type of activity, and as and when we find things, which we think is inevitable, we’ll notify law enforcement, and where we can, the public.”

American intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning for months that Russia’s efforts to undermine American democracy remain active and pose a threat to this year’s elections. If in fact Russian, the activity would provide vivid evidence that the kind of cyber operations used around the 2016 campaign were still in use.</s>NEW YORK — Facebook said it has uncovered "sophisticated" efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.

The company said it removed 32 accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in "coordinated" political behavior and appeared to be fake.

Facebook stopped short of saying the effort was aimed at influencing the U.S. midterm elections in November, although the timing of the suspicious activity would be consistent with such an attempt.

According to a Facebook official, the company held briefings in the House and Senate this week. The official declined to be named because the briefings were private. Facebook disclosed its findings after The New York Times reported on them earlier Tuesday.

The company said it doesn't know who is behind the efforts, but said there may be connections to Russia. Facebook said it has found some connections between the accounts it removed and the accounts connected to Russia's Internet Research Agency that it removed before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

The earliest page was created in March 2017. Facebook says more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages. The most followed Facebook Pages had names such as "Aztlan Warriors," ''Black Elevation," ''Mindful Being," and "Resisters."

Facebook says the pages ran about 150 ads for $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in U.S. and Canadian dollars. The first ad was created in April 2017; the last was created in June 2018.

The company added that the perpetrators have been "more careful to cover their tracks" than in 2016, in part because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse over the past year. For example, they used virtual private networks and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf.

Associated Press Writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this story from Washington.</s>(Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. has identified an ongoing effort to influence the U.S. midterm elections, using inauthentic accounts and pages on the social network.

“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this,” Facebook said Tuesday in a blog post. “It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency has in the past.”

The company has stepped up its work to ferret out fake accounts after a Russian-backed effort sowed discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook and other social media networks have been criticized by lawmakers for failing to recognize and take steps to stop those efforts.

Facebook said that starting last week, it identified eight pages and 17 profiles on its main social network, and seven accounts on Instagram, that violated its rules. It shared the findings with U.S. law enforcement, Congress, and other technology companies. The company said it was letting the public know ahead of a real protest the fake accounts had planned and coordinated in the nation’s capital for next week.

The discovery of the election-interference campaign was earlier reported by the New York Times.</s>(Reuters) - Facebook Inc has identified a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead users and organize rallies ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections, taking down dozens of fake accounts on its site, the company said on Tuesday.

A Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper in the 2016 U.S. election by posting and buying ads on Facebook, according to the company and U.S. intelligence agencies. Moscow has denied involvement.

Facebook on Tuesday said here had it removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram, part of an effort to combat foreign meddling in U.S. elections, attempts that lawmakers have called dangerous for democracy.

The company said it was still in the early stages of its investigation and did not yet know who may be behind the influence campaign for 2018 elections that will determine whether or not the Republican Party keeps control of Congress.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on a call with reporters that the attempts to manipulate public opinion would likely become more sophisticated to evade Facebook’s scrutiny, calling it an “arms race.”

“This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” the company said in a blogpost.

More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages and that about $11,000 had been spent on about 150 ads, Facebook said. The pages had created about 30 events since May 2017.

Facebook for months has been on the defensive about influence activity on its site and concerns over user privacy tied to longstanding agreements with developers that allowed them access to private user data.

Facebook identified influence activity around at least two issues, including a counter-protest to a “Unite the Right II” rally set next week in Washington. The other was the #AbolishICE social media campaign aimed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In the blogpost, Facebook said it was revealing the influence effort now in part because of the rally. A previous event last year in Charlottesville, South Carolina, led to violence by white supremacists.

Facebook said it would tell users who had expressed interest in the counter-protest what action it had taken and why.

Facebook officials on a call with reporters said that one known account from Russia’s Internet Research Agency was a co-administrator of one of the fake pages for seven minutes, but the company did not believe that was enough evidence to attribute the campaign to the Russian government.

The company previously had said 126 million Americans may have seen Russian-backed political content on Facebook over a two-year period, and that 16 million may have been exposed to Russian information on Instagram.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, in a statement urged Facebook to move against foreign groups trying to sway American voters and to warn legitimate users that such activity, as seen in 2016, is recurring this year.

“Today’s announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we’ve long feared: that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously-identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponize social media platforms to influence the U.S. electorate,” Schiff said.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, said in a statement there would be a hearing on Wednesday about the online threat to U.S. election security.

Burr said the goal of influence operations “is to sow discord, distrust, and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system. The Russians want a weak America.”

Washington imposed punitive sanctions on Russia following U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Moscow interfered to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections, one of the reasons U.S.-Russian relations are at a post-Cold War low. Both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have said, however, that they want to improve ties between the two nuclear powers.

Facebook disclosed in September that Russians under fake names had used the social network to try to influence U.S. voters in the months before and after the 2016 election, writing about divisive issues, setting up events and buying ads.

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russian state operators ran the campaign combining fake social media posts and hacking into Democratic Party networks, eventually becoming an effort to help Republican candidate Trump, who scored a surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Over the past several months, the company has taken steps meant to reassure U.S. and European lawmakers that further regulation is unnecessary. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says the company has 20,000 people working to police and protect the site.

Costs associated with that effort are part of the reason Facebook said last week that it expects its profit margins to decline, a warning that sent shares tumbling about 25 percent, the biggest one-day loss of market cap in U.S. stock market history. Shares of Facebook were up about 1.5 percent in Tuesday’s midafternoon trading, part of a broader tech rebound.</s>Facebook has removed a network of suspected Russian-linked accounts and pages involved in organizing political events in the United States. The network is the most extensive effort to interfere in American politics that Facebook has found and made public ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The move comes as part of Facebook’s efforts to prevent a repeat of 2016, when accounts connected to a Kremlin-linked troll group posing as Americans ran rampant on its platform.

In briefings on Capitol Hill, Facebook has told lawmakers that it suspects a Russian group is behind more than 30 pages advocating US political stances, according to a congressional source briefed on the matter. One page promoted a “No Unite the Right 2” march — a counter demonstration to a planned “Unite the Right” event to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the march in Charlottesville in which a woman was killed. There was also an effort to amplify the “Abolish ICE” message pushed by liberals, the source said.

Publicly, Facebook is saying it does not know for sure who was behind the network, but is saying it has “found evidence of some connections between these accounts” and accounts that had been run by Russian trolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The company also said it had reported the network to law enforcement and to Congress.

Asked by CNN to respond to the reports, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said, “I hope the materials will be officially presented to the Russian side.”

Facebook said the “Resisters” page, which organized the “No Unite the Right 2” event, recruited real activists who “unwittingly helped build interest in” the event” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.”

Facebook said it has contacted the real activists.

Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a post that the company was still investigating where the pages were run from but that, “Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections.” (The IRA is the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll group that has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on charges related to an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.)

He cautioned, “But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.”

“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that’s ever done,” the company said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon,” Facebook said in a statement Tuesday.

The removed pages had more than 290,000 followers, the company said. The most followed Facebook pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”

The company said the pages ran 150 ads for a total of approximately $11,000. The ads were paid for in US and Canadian dollars, the company added. In 2016, the Internet Research Agency had purchased ads targeting Americans using rubles.

Next week’s event was not the only event the pages created. The pages created about 30 events since May 2017 and “The largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users said that they would attend,” Facebook said.

Facebook has sought guidance from U.S. intelligence agencies in its attempt to prevent a repeat of 2016, when its platform was used to meddle in U.S. politics and society.</s>Facebook announced on Tuesday that is has banned 32 pages and accounts it said were engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior," on the platform, but the company says it does not yet know who is behind the campaign."We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts - including who may be behind this," Facebook said in a post on its website . "But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change."In a call Tuesday with reporters, Facebook Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg and other top company officials confirmed the news, which comes fewer than 100 days out from a consequential U.S. midterm election.Sandberg said Facebook does not yet know who is behind the campaign, but that the actors went to even "greater lengths to obscure their true identities," than the Russian and Internet Research Agency (IRA)-linked actors that spread misinformation on the platform before the 2016 presidential election."Security is an arms race and it's never done. We've made it harder for inauthentic actors to operate on Facebook. Yet we face determined well-funded adversaries who won't give up and who are constantly changing tactics," Sandberg said. "That means we need to continually improve as well."In response to a question from ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis, Facebook officials did say there was one instance of a known IRA-linked account becoming a co-administrator of a page on the platform for "seven minutes," before it was discovered and then removed."There was only one known IRA account that was a co-admin on one of these pages and that was just for about 7 minutes, so it was a brief period of time," said Tom Reynolds, an official with Facebook's communications team.Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said that while the pages do share similarities with previous IRA-linked accounts, there are differences this time around in the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used by the accounts in this most recent influence campaign."While IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts were disabled last year sometimes use Russian IP address. We haven't seen those here," Gleicher said.ABC News Contributor John Cohen, a former acting undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the potential links to Russia show yet again that countries persistent desire to generate discontent and confusion in the American political process."It appears these accounts may be associated with Russian entities. If true, Facebook's actions would serve as yet another reminder that Russia continues its efforts to sow discord across America, disrupt our political process and weaken our nation," Cohen said, "Russia seeks to undermine our democracy and their continued attacks represents an existential threat to our national security."The accounts -- which Facebook said were created as early as March 2017 and May 2018, were first discovered two weeks ago.According to Facebook officials more than 290,000 users on the site followed at least one of the pages involved in the "inauthentic behavior."The eight fake organization pages and 17 accounts posted a total of 9,500 times on the site and spent $11,000 on ads starting in April 2017, according to Facebook officials.When asked if the campaign was specifically an attempt to influence the 2018 midterm elections, officials said they are not characterizing what exactly the political aim of the network was, but that they "expect to find activity focused on the midterms," given their proximity.Gleicher detailed the campaign these actors were engaged in, including an instance in which the network tried to boost interest in an August 10-12 event called "No Unite the Right 2 - D.C.," billed as a counter-protest to a rally planned in the nation's capital by the same group that organized a protest that sparked violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer.Gleicher said that the company disabled the event posting on Tuesday and notified 2,600 Facebook users that indicated interest in attending the event.Facebook officials also said they detected activity from the network that mentioned the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency(ICE), and around the #AbolishICE movement that has grown in popularity in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in recent weeks."There were several mentions of ICE in the material that we took down today for coordinating inauthentic behavior and that includes one event that's protesting ICE," said Reynolds. "We'd expected these types of coordinated actors to engage in popular social movements like that. But at this point, as I said, because we aren't specifically attributing who was engaged-who the actor is here, that's what we understand so far about the engagement with ICE."North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a a statement Tuesday that he is "glad to see that Facebook is taking a much-needed step toward limiting the use of their platform by foreign influence campaigns.""The goal of these operations is to sow discord, distrust, and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system. The Russians want a weak America," Burr added ahead of a Wednesday hearing of of the Intelligence Committee titled, "Foreign Influence on Social Media Platforms: Perspectives from Third-Party Social Media Expert."The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, similarly said in a statement that the announcement shows "further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity."When asked about Warner's assertion that the Kremlin is involved in the nefarious activity, Facebook made clear Tuesday that it is not accusing any group or country of being behind the network."In this situation, we have shared our technical details with law enforcement and we believe law enforcement and the intelligence community will have a lot more data upon which they can draw, and if they want to make an attribution decision that's up to them," Gleicher said.The Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff of California, said in a statement, "Today's announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we've long feared: that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously-identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponize social media platforms to influence the U.S. electorate."Schiff added, "Facebook must continue proactively identifying these actors, notifying Congress and law enforcement, and taking necessary steps to remove the foreign influence content and to notify legitimate Facebook users who fell victim to the same covert tradecraft that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed through the 2016 election."</s>Facebook says it has identified a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead its users and sow dissension among voters ahead of November's U.S. congressional elections.



It said it had removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram, part of an effort to combat foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

The company stopped short of identifying the source of the misinformation. But members of Congress who had been briefed by Facebook on the matter said the methodology of the influence campaign suggested Russian involvement.

“I can say I think with pretty high confidence I think this is Russian-related,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Two U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that Russia was behind the Facebook campaign, but one noted that “the similarities, aims and methodology relative to the 2016 Russian campaign are quite striking."

A Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper in the 2016 U.S. election by posting and buying ads on Facebook, according to the company and U.S. intelligence agencies. In February, the U.S. Justice Department indicted 13 Russian nationals, and the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.

Facebook has been on the defensive about influence activity on its site and concerns over user privacy tied to long-standing agreements with developers that allowed them access to private user data.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, which was shown the suspended pages ahead of the takedown, said they showed similarities in language and approach to previously fake accounts from the Internet Research Agency, which is known as the “troll factory” because it stirs up public opinion on social media sites.

The lab cited “consistent mistranslation, as well as an overwhelming focus on polarizing issues at the top of any given news cycle.” It said, for example, the posts on the year-old, feminist Resisters page “took a liberal or left-wing stance on issues around gender, race, immigration, and human rights.” Other pages promoted racial pride among minority groups.

The group said the Resisters page was alarming because it was pushing for confrontation at multiple protests, including against "Unite the Right 2," with a potential for violence.

A man who identified himself as an administrator of Resisters, Washington activist Brendan Orsinger, said on a video call with Reuters that he had been invited to help operate the page by someone he knew only through Facebook messages.

"I definitely had concerns, because people don't usually invite me to accounts unless they know me," Orsinger said. "But at the same time, this was an account we could use."

He said that more than a dozen legitimate activist groups were still supporting the counter-rally and would now have to work harder to reconnect with people who had been following it through the Resisters page.

Orsinger said he was not yet sure that the account that had involved him was Russian, but that if it was, he was concerned about he and fellow activists being infiltrated and influenced.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said on a call with reporters that the attempts to manipulate public opinion would likely become more sophisticated to evade Facebook’s scrutiny, calling it an "arms race."

The White House said the administration was supportive of Facebook's actions.

"We applaud efforts by our private-sector partners to combat an array of threats that occur in cyberspace, including malign influence," said Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

U.S. President Donald Trump has come under fire for discounting the threat of interference in the congressional elections.

During his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki earlier this month, Trump appeared to state that he believed Russia was no longer trying to influence the U.S. election process.

Trump later amended that, saying he was "very concerned" about Russian interference in the election. On Friday, Trump held a meeting with his national security advisers on election security.

Facebook identified influence activity around at least two issues, including the counter-protest to the Unite the Right 2 rally set next week in Washington. The other was the #AbolishICE social media campaign aimed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In an online post, Facebook said it was disclosing the influence effort now in part because of the rally. A previous event last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to violence by white supremacists.

"This kind of behaviour is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing," the company said.

More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages and about $11,000 had been spent on about 150 ads, Facebook said. The pages had created about 30 events since May 2017.

Facebook officials on a call with reporters said one known account from Russia's Internet Research Agency was a co-administrator of one of the fake pages for seven minutes, but the company did not believe that was enough evidence to attribute the campaign to the Russian government.

The company previously said 126 million Americans may have seen Russian-backed political content on Facebook over a two-year period, and that 16 million may have been exposed to Russian information on the Instagram photo-sharing app.

Over the past several months, the company has taken steps meant to reassure U.S. and European lawmakers that further regulation is unnecessary. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says the company has 20,000 people working to police and protect the site.
Facebook announces that it has suspended 32 accounts it believes intended to influence the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States. The company says while it is uncertain who operated these accounts, at least one is linked to the Russian-based Internet Research Agency.