Facebook has reported that they removed hundreds of Russia-initiated accounts, which it judged to be involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior on its platforms, including some linked to state-owned news agency Sputnik. Reuters brought this interesting news to our attention in their article, “Facebook blocks accounts linked to Russian state-owned Sputnik.”
This comes after much outrage and investigations into Facebook’s lack of screening accounts and developing tools to combat extremist content and propaganda operations. In this recent housekeeping efforts, Facebook said it identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity it saw prior to the U.S. midterms, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency (IRA) activity. IRA was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2018 for flooding social media with false information in a bid to stir up discontent in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Iran and Russia have and continue to deny allegations that they used social media platforms to launch disinformation campaigns.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
