Facebook IDs New Fake Influence Campaign

Facebook announced Tuesday it has identified a new ongoing political influence campaign and has removed more than 30 fake accounts and pages.

NYT:

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference.

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Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues. Facebook discovered coordinated activity around issues like a sequel to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ...

CNN:

Publicly, Facebook is saying it does not know for sure who was behind the network, but is saying it has "found evidence of some connections between these accounts" and accounts that had been run by Russian trolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The company also said it had reported the network to law enforcement and to Congress.

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Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a post that the company was still investigating where the pages were run from but that, "Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections." (The IRA is the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll group that has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office on charges related to an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.)

He cautioned, "But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven't seen those here."

"It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that's ever done," the company said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon," Facebook said in a statement Tuesday.

The removed pages had more than 290,000 followers, the company said. The most followed Facebook pages were "Aztlan Warriors," "Black Elevation," "Mindful Being," and "Resisters."

The company said the pages ran 150 ads for a total of approximately $11,000. The ads were paid for in US and Canadian dollars, the company added. In 2016, the Internet Research Agency had purchased ads targeting Americans using rubles.

Next week's event was not the only event the pages created. The pages created about 30 events since May 2017 and "The largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users said that they would attend," Facebook said.

Politico:

[Facebook's] action marked the social media giant's first significant acknowledgment of an ongoing, coordinated propaganda campaign on its site since it implemented new safeguards after the 2016 vote.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning at 9:30am ET titled, "Open Hearing: Foreign Influence Operations and their use of Social Media Platforms"

Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA):

House Intel Committee top Democrat Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-NC):

More from Rep. Schiff:

“Today's announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we've long feared: that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously-identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponize social media platforms to influence the U.S. electorate. Foreign influence actors remain readily capable of manipulating raw emotion and societal divisions to prey on unsuspecting Americans who use these same social media tools for legitimate political expression, organization, and advocacy.

“Facebook must continue proactively identifying these actors, notifying Congress and law enforcement, and taking necessary steps to remove the foreign influence content and to notify legitimate Facebook users who fell victim to the same covert tradecraft that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed through the 2016 election.

“It is clear that much more work needs to be done before the midterm elections to harden our defenses, because foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016 — dividing us along political and ideological lines, to the detriment of our cherished democratic system. As DNI Coats said earlier this month, the warning lights are blinking red as we approach the 2018 midterms.”