The social media company says it sees similarities to Russia's 2016 election meddling. | Alexander Koerner/Getty Images Facebook suspends 'inauthentic' accounts, sees Russia link The social media company says it sees ties to Russia's 2016 election meddling

Facebook shut down more than two dozen "inauthentic" accounts and pages on Tuesday that sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and said their activity was similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.

The 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.


Several prominent lawmakers tied the activity to what they called the Kremlin's broader efforts to undermine American democracy.

Facebook's disclosure is also the latest indication that Russia threatens to meddle again in the 2018 U.S. elections. The Daily Beast reported last week that Sen. Claire McCaskill, a vulnerable Missouri Democrat, was the target of a Russia-linked phishing scam.

Facebook briefed lawmakers and Trump administration officials on its findings and response this week, according to a source who attended one of the sessions. More than 290,000 Facebook users followed the now-shuttered pages, which were created between March 2017 and May 2018. The most followed – titled “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” and “Mindful Being” – reached more than 290,000 users. The topics also included the hashtag #AbolishICE, a popular new rallying cry on the left following outrage over the Trump administration's separation of immigrant families along the Mexican border.

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The accounts also ran about 150 ads on Facebook and Instagram, at a cost of $11,000 paid in U.S. dollars. One of them was created as recently as last month. Of 30 events created by the accounts since May 2017, most had fewer than 100 people interested in attending. But one was substantial, collecting 4,700 interested and 1,400 confirmed attendees.

Though the company said it couldn’t conclusively identify the source of the phony pages, company officials said they resembled the activity of the Kremlin-connected Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, whose top officials were indicted earlier this year by special counsel Robert Mueller for seeking to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

“Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we've found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year,” the company wrote in a memo posted on its website Tuesday afternoon. Facebook suspended 32 accounts and pages in all, including some on Instagram.

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested the Facebook disclosure was a sign that the Kremlin was undeterred in its attempts to interfere in U.S. elections.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity," said Warner, (D-Va.). "I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future.”

During the 2016 campaign, the Kremlin-linked IRA published thousands of Facebook ads, many not explicitly election-related but still aimed at inflaming divisions in U.S. society and sowing racial discord. In response, Congress hauled Facebook executives to Capitol Hill and the company suffered a public relations crisis.

Mueller and congressional investigators have focused on such issue-oriented ads as part of their election meddling probes. Facebook in October 2017 announced it would require more documentation from advertisers seeking to run federal election ads, and this year began requiring buyers of ads on issues like race, immigration and guns to verify their identity — and, in an effort to prevent foreign interference, their location and who is paying for them.

John Hegeman, Facebook’s head of News Feed, told POLITICO in a sit-down at the company’s D.C. headquarters this month that Facebook is now able to spot a trolling operation akin to the IRA's 2016 activity thanks to scores of changes made to the site since election day 2016.

“Would we catch 100 percent of everything they do? No,” said Hegeman. But he added that, thanks to new tactics like auto-detection of imposter accounts to working with third-party fact checkers, “we would not be able to have something on the scale like [the IRA] today. We’d be able to prevent that.”

In April, Facebook removed 70 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts and 65 Instagram accounts, as well as 138 Facebook pages after determining they were linked to the IRA.

Top U.S. officials are already warning that the cyber-threat from foreign actors is an increasing danger to America, including the U.S. political process.

"Most Americans go about their daily lives without fear of personal injury or harm," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a security conference in New York City. "But our digital lives are now in danger every single day."

That includes threats to the U.S. via election interference such as the 2016 presidential campaign in which 12 Russian hackers have been indicted for attempting to undermine American democratic institutions.

"The United States will no longer tolerate your interference," she warned, referring to any foreign hackers trying to disrupt U.S. elections. "You will be exposed. And, you will pay a high price."

In its briefings and blog post, Facebook emphasized that it couldn’t conclusively attribute the latest wave of misleading Facebook accounts to Russia, in part because the actors took more sophisticated steps to cover their tracks.

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“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,” the company wrote. “We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.”

However, Facebook also indicated that at least one of the events hosted by a page titled “Resisters” had been shared by an IRA account that Facebook disabled in 2017. “Resisters” also briefly listed an IRA account as one of its administrators, a slip that helped Facebook identify the false account and the other 31 pages and profiles it deleted Tuesday morning.

Facebook's disclosure comes days after President Donald Trump seemed to say that Russians are not actively interfering in the U.S. political process. Trump has faced withering bipartisan criticism for repeatedly questioning his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions that Russia was behind an interference effort in 2016 and was poised to do so again in this year’s elections.

Most recently, Trump infuriated his critics when he said he believed Russia would interfere in the 2018 election – on behalf of Democrats.

“Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats,” he tweeted. “They definitely don’t want Trump!”

Tim Starks contributed reporting.