Washington (CNN Business) For anyone hoping that foreign operations are no longer using social media to try to meddle in and influence debate and policy in the US and all over the world, Thursday should be a wakeup call.

Thursday afternoon, Facebook announced the suspension of a network of accounts it said was engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram" that was "directed from Iran."

Almost simultaneously, Twitter announced that it had suspended what it termed networks of accounts that it termed "foreign information operations" potentially connected to Iran, Venezuela and Russia.

Twitter said it was confident that the accounts it identified as linked to Russia had originated there, but could not say for sure whether they were run by the Internet Research Agency, the notorious Kremlin-linked troll group indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller last year.

The hundreds of Russia-linked accounts it suspended had together sent almost a million tweets, many relating to US politics, Twitter said. The accounts appear at the moment to have been significantly less influential than those allegedly run by the Internet Research Agency during the 2016 presidential campaign. But they had tried to weigh in on the 2018 midterm elections; the accounts tweeted more than 73,000 times about those elections, Twitter said.

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