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In a newsroom Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" designed to influence US policy on its platform.
According to Facebook's head of cybersecurity, Nathaniel Gleicher's policy, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. Until now, the activity includes eight Facebook pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook said that the activity "violate [s] our ban on inauthentic behavior coordinated."
Facebook declined to assign new results to the Russian Government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), but an IRA account was found a co-admin on one of the events fake newly released "for only seven minutes."
Facebook has been in contact with Congress and the police on the discovery, suggesting that social platforms should expect to detect again the type of misinformation campaigns targeting the 2016 elections around mid-term elections in the United States in November. The company said more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the identified pages. The pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and more recently in May 2018.
The most popular pages displaying this type of behavior were "Aztlans Warriors", "Black Elevation", "Mindful Being" and "Resisters". ". The other pages had fewer than 10 subscribers each and the Instagram account had no followers. This does not necessarily eliminate other types of potential activities, such as comments and messages.
Like the false ads related to Russia and the pages formerly published by the House and the Senate, the new content specifically amplifies the American tensions around the race. The examples published by Facebook seem to mainly target the American political left. Some examples explicitly contain anti-Trump content, but most offer racial identity calls targeting black and Mexican-American Facebook users. 
According to Facebook, "They ran about 150 ads for about $ 11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid in US and Canadian dollars" between April 2017 and June of this year. The pages have also done around 30 Facebook events.
As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts work more cautiously than the disgraceful Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election:
For example they used VPNs and voice services. Internet, paid third parties to serve ads on their behalf. As we told law enforcement and Congress, we still have no solid evidence to say for sure who is behind this effort. Part of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled the I & # 39; 39, last year, which is covered below. But there are also differences. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts that we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We did not see them here.
Yet, the recently discovered wave of activity that drives polarizing political content on Facebook echoes the previous IRA-related content. There is enough evidence that Senate War Committee Vice-President Mark Warner is an important figure in the investigation of the culpability of technology in the dissemination of Russian misinformation. Facebook to sow division and spread misinformation, and I'm pleased that Facebook is taking steps to identify and treat this activity, "Warner said in a statement to TechCrunch.
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