As public impeachment hearings kicked off in Washington last week, a meme featuring Rep. Adam Schiff spread across Facebook.

Within minutes of one another, at least 23 pages with state-themed names such as Ohio Supporters for President Donald J Trump and Iowa Supporters for President Donald J Trump shared an image of Schiff with the words “Lock Up Adam Schiff for Treason” and “Make American Great Again” encircling his head. This was one of two anonymously run pro-Trump networks of pages identified by a researcher and BuzzFeed News that share memes and stories, some of which are false or misleading, in a coordinated fashion. When contacted for comment, Facebook told BuzzFeed News the two networks do not violate its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior.

While it’s unclear exactly who's behind the network that spread the Schiff meme, the pages heavily promote posts from the campaign page of Robert Hyde, a landscaping business owner seeking the GOP nomination for a congressional seat in Connecticut. On the Connecticut Supporters for President Donald J Trump page, Hyde is seen posing with Trump in its profile and background photos.

When asked about his relationship to the network of pages, Hyde was evasive. “I like positivity and like to follow all Trump media,” he said in an initial email to BuzzFeed News. In a follow-up message, he said he does not run the pages.

The pages and their murky connections to a political candidate highlight the challenges in determining who is behind coordinated activity on Facebook, whose interest page networks may serve, and what does and doesn’t rise to the platform’s standard of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The enforcement of that policy is a major focus going into next year’s US election, as Facebook works to prevent the rampant manipulation and inauthentic behavior that marred the 2016 campaign on the world’s largest social network.

The company’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, told BuzzFeed News it will tread lightly in cases where “activity that may appear ‘coordinated and inauthentic’ … [but] could in fact be run by real people who are passionate about a particular issue.”

Facebook's decisions about what it considers to be partisans promoting their views and what is a violation of its policies promises to be a source of controversy and partisan wrangling over the next twelve months.

"That’s why we want to ensure we avoid enforcing against innocent actors and prioritize helping people distinguish between inauthentic behavior and authentic speech," Gleicher said in a statement.

Along with increasing the number of takedowns for coordinated inauthentic behavior, Facebook has put a priority on new transparency tools that enable users to identify the countries where page managers are based, learn when a page was created, and see if it has changed its name over time. It also recently announced a new policy that requires a page that is "misleading people about its purpose" to go through the company's business verification process and disclose if a specific organization is running it.

“Earlier this month we rolled out a new Page transparency policy to help people understand who is behind Pages they are interacting with on Facebook. We know that some networks of surreptitiously coordinated Pages can mislead users and appear organic," Gleicher said.

That feature would in theory address the issue highlighted by a recent Popular Information report about a “clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from [conservative publisher] The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.”

Facebook did not take action against the pages and instead said it would require those pages to go through the business verification process. It's now three weeks since Popular Information’s story was published and two weeks since the new policy was publicly announced, and the pages still do not disclose their relationship with Daily Wire or its parent company.

A Facebook spokesperson said it's difficult to estimate how long it takes for pages to go through the business verification process. They said some existing cases could be resolved within a week or more.