Facebook and Twitter take down Russia-backed accounts
Facebook and Twitter have taken down a small network of accounts that were backed by a Russian influence operation, linked to interference in the 2016 US election.
Facebook said the accounts were linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is close to the Russian government and accused of interfering in the 2016 US election.
The operation is reported to centre around Peacedata, which claimed to be a non-profit news website in English and Arabic serving a left-leaning audience.
Facebook said it had removed 13 accounts and two pages but the Russian operation had achieved “very little reach” with around 14,000 accounts following one or more of the pages it had removed.
Twitter also said it had suspended five accounts “for platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors”. Like Facebook it said the accounts had little reach, with “low quality and spammy” tweets receiving few likes or retweets.
The announcements by the two social networking giants yesterday came after collaboration with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force over the site.
The IRA is one of the Russian-backed companies that was indicted by the US Department of Justice during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged interference in the US 2016 election campaign.
Facebook said the deleted accounts had used fake names and pictures but legitimate and “unwitting” freelance writers seemed to have written for the Peacedata website.
Russian interference has been an ongoing concern since 2016, when the government reportedly meddled in the US election with the goal of harming Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Facebook and Twitter have previously disclosed Russian interference on their platforms. And the recent discovery comes just months before the US presidential election between President Trump and Joe Biden.
Earlier this year FBI director Christopher Wray warned that Russia’s use of social media to spread disinformation had “never stopped”.