Facebook has taken down 32 fake pages and accounts that it says were involved in coordinated campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram. Though the company has not yet attributed the accounts to any group, it says the campaign does bear some resemblance to the propaganda campaign run by Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Facebook is now working with law enforcement to determine where the campaign originated.

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"We’re still in the very early stages of the investigation, and we don’t know all the facts, including who might be behind it," Facebook's chief operating officer said on a call with reporters Tuesday.

According to Facebook, some 290,000 Facebook users followed at least one of these pages. The most popular ones were called Aztlan Warriors, Black Elevation, Mindful Being, and Resisters. Across the phony accounts and pages, Facebook found politically divisive content about, among other things, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, President Trump, and the Unite the Right rally scheduled for Washington, DC, in August. These pages also organized about 30 events over the past year.

One event, a protest against Unite the Right in Washington called “No Unite the Right 2 – DC,” was scheduled for August 10th. It was cohosted by other, legitimate pages, and more than 3,000 people indicated they were interested in or planned on attending. The desire to get out ahead of this event, Facebook says, hastened its announcement. The company says it disabled the event on Tuesday and alerted the administrators of those pages. It will also notify those users who were interested in attending the event, but a spokesperson told WIRED it’s “premature” to alert all 290,000 people impacted by the campaign.

Shortly after the announcement, other organizers of the protest took to Twitter to object to Facebook's suspension of the event. "I cannot believe I have to say this: The Unite the Right counter protest is not being organized by Russians," wrote one user, Dylan Petrohilos. "We have permits in DC, we have numerous local orgs like BLM, Resist This, and Antifascist groups working on this protest. FB deleted the event because 1 page was sketch." Petrohilos also tweeted that the event was founded by another group, not the Resisters page.

The news, which was first reported by The New York Times, is the first indication by Facebook that it's detected this kind of activity in advance of the midterm elections in the United States. Just one week ago, in a call with members of the press, Facebook executives evaded several questions on the matter, saying only that the company would report any such activity to law enforcement. The company began looking into this particular network two weeks ago.