On December 20, Facebook suspended nine apparently Bangladeshi pages that were masquerading as news outlets and posting on political themes, just ahead of the Asian nation’s election on December 30, 2018.

The exposure is important for the way it highlights another attempt by unknown actors to activate a network of counterfeit pages just before a general election. Most of the pages were only a few weeks old and had only a few hundred followers. As such, they appear to have been a failed attempt at interference.

Given the relatively low amount of content they posted, there is insufficient open-source evidence to attribute them to a particular actor.

Facebook shared the names of the nine pages with @DFRLab hours before the takedown; three of them had already been suspended. Facebook also concluded that the pages were part of a coordinated network. This post describes the remaining six pages’ visible activity, for posterity, since they have now been taken offline.

@bbc.bd.official

This page masqueraded as the BBC’s Bengali service. It used the BBC’s official logo and color scheme and, in an apparent attempt to look like a verified page, had photoshopped a blue check-mark over it. Its most recent post was on November 14 and described a clash between police and supporters of the opposition BNP party.