Facebook has detected a campaign to manipulate the US elections of 2018

According to Facebook, this is the first campaign to manipulate the mid-term legislative elections. The social network has removed 32 pages and Facebook and Instagram accounts, spotted as leading a "coordinated action" for. All these accounts and pages were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and have published nearly 10,000 messages on the site. About 300,000 people followed at least one of these pages, which contained about 150 sponsored contents ("ads") for $ 11,000.

While not being able to identify the authors behind this manipulation campaign, Facebook says that "some of these activities are consistent with what (Facebook) had seen from the Internet Research Agency" at the time of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. "We are still in the early stages of our investigation and we do not have all the facts, including those behind it," says the company in a blog post.

This Internet Research Agency, is a Russian company. According to a NYT investigation, it is based in St. Petersburg and has been engaged for several years in online manipulation operations on behalf of the Russian government, which the Kremlin has always denied.

According to the New York Times, Facebook has been working with the FBI to investigate this attempt to interfere in the election. "We face determined, well-financed opponents who will never give up and change tactics all the time. It's a fight for arms, and we're constantly in need of improvement, "Facebook said in a statement.

For the 2016 election, Facebook's legal counsel Colin Stretch said in October 2017 that about 29 million people had received content in their news feed directly from the 80,000 Internet Research Agency publications between 2015 and 2017. Through sharing, comments and likes, Facebook estimated that $ 126 million could have been exposed to one of these propaganda contents.