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By Lalit K Jha Washington, July 31 (PTI) The world's largest social network Facebook announced today the removal of 32 pages and accounts from its platform and Instagram photo sharing site, claiming that they were involved in an inauthentic behavior attempted to influence public opinion on political issues prior to the November mid-term elections in the United States.
"This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we do not want people to create networks of accounts, they are, or what they do," he said.
Noting that this is still in the early stages of its investigation and that there are not all the facts, including those that might be behind this, the Facebook said that It is clear that those who created these accounts went much further to conceal their true identity, which the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.
"We think that this could to be partly due to the changes we made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much more difficult, "said the social media giant, facing determined and well-funded opponents are constantly evolving tactics.
"It's an arms race and we need to to improve, "he added.
Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Special Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Facebook's disclosure is further evidence that Russia continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread misinformation .
"I am delighted that Facebook is taking steps to identify this activity and I expect Facebook, as well as other platforms, to continue to identify troll activity. and to work with Congress to update our laws to better protect our democracy in the future, "Warner said.
Facebook said it all started two weeks ago when it identified the first of eight pages and 17 profiles on its social media site, as well as seven Instagram accounts, which violate its ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.
All were withdrawn this morning after completing its initial investigation and shared information with US law enforcement agencies, Congress, other technology companies and the Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab atlantic, a research organization that helps identify and badyze abuses on Facebook.
In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these pages, the oldest having been created in March 2017. The last one was created in May 2018.
The most followed Facebook pages were " Aztlan Warriors "," Black Elevation "," Mindful Being "and" Resisters ". The remaining pages had between 0 and 10 followers, and Instagram accounts had no followers, he said.
According to Facebook, they broadcast about 150 ads for about $ 11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid in US and Canadian dollars.
The first ad was created in April 2017, and the last one was created in June 2018. The pages have created about 30 events since May 2017. About half had less than 100 accounts interested. The largest had about 4,700 accounts interested in participating, and 1,400 users said they would attend, he said.
"These bad actors took more care to cover their tracks, partly because of the measures we took over the past year," he added.
For example, they used virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet telephony services and paid third parties to serve ads on their behalf.
Noting that there is still no concrete evidence to say for sure who is behind this effort, Facebook said that part of the activity is consistent with what's going on. 39; she saw IRA before and after the elections of 2016.
"We found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes We have not seen Russian IP addresses. " PTI LKJ SMJ
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This is an unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India thread
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