More than two dozen false pages and accounts have been removed from Facebook and Instagram after the company uncovered what The New York Times reported is a “coordinated political influence campaign” around divisive social issues in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.

The 32 pages and accounts, according to The New York Times, were created between March 2017 and May 2018, and more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these pages. In a statement posted on Facebook's site, Nathaniel Gleicher, the company's head of cybersecurity policy, said the most followed pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”

Notably, as the research organization Digitial Forensic Research (DFR) Lab pointed out, it appears the “bad actors” — as Facebook is referring to the accounts — were targeting a left-leaning audience. They were posting content and events against the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy of separating children at the border and in support of Black Lives Matter and America’s Muslim communities.

“The pattern of behavior by the accounts and on the pages in question make one thing abundantly clear: They sought to promote divisions and set Americans against one another," Graham Brookie, director and managing editor of the DFR Lab, told Teen Vogue. "The events coordinated by — or with help from — inauthentic accounts did have a very real, organic, and engaged online community; however, the intent of the inauthentic activity appeared to be designed to catalyze worst impulses within each group.”

Facebook first detected the activity two weeks ago and shared the information with Congress, law enforcement agencies, other technology companies, and the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. The accounts, which include 17 Facebook profiles, 8 Facebook pages, and 7 Instagram accounts, paid $11,000 in American and Canadian currency between April 2017 and June 2018 to run 150 ads on the platform, The New York Times reported.

Facebook made the decision to publicly release its findings in light of a page promoting a counter-rally to the Unite the Right rally scheduled to be held in Washington, D.C., next month, according to The Washington Post.

Although it’s not yet evident who, or what, is behind the influence campaign, Gleicher made clear in his statement that the company has not ruled out the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was dubbed a “troll farm” by The Daily Beast back in May.

“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-bred Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past,” Gleicher said in his statement, which was echoed by Facebook's chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg during a call with reporters on Tuesday.

“We still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort,” Gleicher’s statement said. “Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence from some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts.”

According to the DFR Lab, Russian-led operations in the past also targeted audiences whose politics leaned left, specifically using content about African Americans and Muslim Americans.

But the lengths the “bad actors” are going to to shield their identities are also notable. According to Facebook, the actors paid third parties to run ads on their behalf, as well as Internet phone services and virtual private networks (VPNs), which protect online data.

“Given these bad actors are now working harder to obscure their identities, we need to find every small mistake they make,” Gleicher said. The DFR Lab also pointed out that language patterns in some posts were “non-English” and were consistent with language patterns seen in earlier Russian disinformation campaigns.

In another statement, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, cited one instance of a known IRA account that was an administrator on one of the now-removed pages controlled by the as-yet unidentified actors.

These revelations come after a tough week for Facebook. The social media giant’s stock suffered the biggest one-day drop in history, losing $199 billion from its value, according to CBS News. That day, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped from number 3 to number 6 on the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index, according to MarketWatch. The declines are expected to continue amid a decline in users on the platform, something these latest revelations will likely do little to help.

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