On the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook took down 115 suspicious Facebook and Instagram accounts after federal law enforcement officials say they may have had links to foreign entities.
Faced with ongoing concerns over its role in the 2016 presidential election, Facebook said it removed 115 dubious Facebook and Instagram accounts a day before Tuesday’s midterm elections for operating with “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The company said in a blog post late Monday that it removed 30 Facebook accounts and 85 from Instagram, which U. S. law enforcement officials said were “linked to foreign entities.” Almost all the Facebook pages involved were in either French or Russian, while the Instagram accounts that were removed were mostly in English. Facebook said some of the accounts focused on celebrities, while others centered around politics.
Facebook said federal officials notified the company about the suspicious pages on Sunday. The company said that the nature of the current election season influenced its decision to act swiftly.
“Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly,” Facebook said in a statement. “But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the U. S., we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today.”
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U. K., Canada seek to question Facebook’s Zuckerberg before ‘grand committee’ on fake news Facebook said it was continuing to investigate the sites it has taken down and would deliver updates on the matter, including if it finds that the suspicious accounts are tied to the Russian-based Internet Research Agency. The IRA is a Saint Petersburg-based company that is believed to have set up fake accounts on social media sites on the part of Russian businesses and political entities.
The IRA was among three Russian organizations, and 13 Russian individuals, that a U. S. grand jury indicted in early 2018 on charges of illegal interference in the 2016 presidential election.
