Facebook says it has discovered and removed 289 pages and 75 accounts connected to employees of Sputnik, the Russian state-sponsored news network, that were engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its platform.
In a blog post Thursday by Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy, Facebook said around 790,000 accounts follow one or more of the pages, and $135,000 was spent on ads, which were paid for in euros, rubles, and U.S. dollars.
The pages were linked to employees of Moscow-based Sputnik, Facebook said. In a statement, a spokesperson for Sputnik said Facebook’s decision was "practically censorship."
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The pages and accounts linked to Sputnik and were being represented as independent news pages, Gleicher said in an interview. The pages contained anti-NATO sentiment and encouraged protests. The first ad ran in 2013, the most recent this month. He said Facebook had also identified overlap with activity by the Internet Research Agency.
From the Facebook Newsroom:
The two operations we found originated in Russia, and one was active in a variety of countries while the other was specific to Ukraine. We didn’t find any links between these operations, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing.
... We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post. In these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.
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... Around 190 events were hosted by these Pages. The first was scheduled for August 2015, and the most recent was scheduled for January 2019. Up to 1,200 people expressed interest in at least one of these events. We cannot confirm whether any of these events actually occurred.
Sputnik was founded in 2014 by Rossiya Segodnya, the country’s biggest state-sponsored news holding, which includes the RT cable channel. Sputnik operates online portals with reporting in about 30 languages. Its websites received 81 million visits in December, with 18 percent coming from Turkey and about 6 percent from the U.S., according to Similarweb.com.
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior from Russia (Facebook Newsroom)
Facebook Accuses Staff at Russia's Sputnik of Fake Accounts (Bloomberg Technology)