Facebook says it discovered a coordinated disinformation operation before the 2018 mid-term elections

Facebook said Tuesday that it had discovered a sophisticated and coordinated misinformation operation on its platform involving 32 fake pages and profiles engaged in division messages before the US mid-term elections

. company that she could not link the business to Russia, which interfered on its platform around the presidential election of 2016. But Facebook said the profiles shared a pattern of behavior with the previous Russian disinformation campaign, led by a group with Kremlin links called Internet Research Agency.

Facebook informed congressional assistants this week. A congressional advisor stated that there was no evidence that political candidates were targeted in the new misinformation effort, but that the pages and accounts sought to spread the politically divisive content around social issues

"It's clear that obscure their true identities that the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past," Facebook said in a post. "We believe that this may be partly due to the changes we have made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much more difficult.But security is not something that has already been We face determined and well-financed adversaries who will never give up and who are constantly changing tactics, it is an arms race and we must constantly improve ourselves. "

In particular, the pages have promoted an event as a counter-rally to a far-right march scheduled for next weekend in Washington. Facebook said that the urgency of the upcoming rally has prompted them to publish the information, even though it is in the early stages of an investigation.

The company, which identified the pages two weeks ago and has since removed them, said that he had not found such activity.

The 32 pages found had between 16 and 18,000 followers. There was no specific evidence that political candidates were targeted, but one account followed an IRA-related account for a brief period.

"Today's disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread misinformation, and I am pleased that Facebook is taking steps to identify and address this activity, "said Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.). "I'm also expecting Facebook, as well as other platform companies, to continue to identify the activity of Russian trolls and work with Congress to keep up to date. our laws to better protect our democracy in the future. " Russian agents spread fake messages using hundreds of accounts. These messages have become viral, reaching more than 100 million Americans.