Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers questions about the improper use of millions of users' data by a political consultancy, at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in this still image taken from Reuters TV May 22, 2018 ReutersTV | Reuters



Facebook said that it's removed pages and content originating in Iran and Russia for "coordinated inauthentic behavior," the social network's latest effort to clean up the site in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The company said in a blog post on Tuesday that it's removed 652 pages, groups and accounts, which targeted people in the Middle East, Latin America, U.K. and the U.S. "These were distinct campaigns and we have not identified any link or coordination between them," the company said. "However, they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing." Facebook's latest update on election meddling and platform abuse comes a month after it revealed a coordinated misinformation campaign around the coming midterm elections in November. The company said in July that it had removed 32 fake accounts and pages from both Facebook and Instagram after finding evidence of what Facebook called "inauthentic behavior."

In a call with reporters after Tuesday's blog post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that it's as important for Facebook to build relationships with law enforcement, governments and other countries to exchange information as it is for the company to develop its own tools for weeding out problematic content. "We think that there's a lot of good work happening on both of those fronts," he said. "This is a top priority for our company." A Facebook spokesperson said on the call that the company had originally planned to release the new information on Thursday, but moved up the announcement. Facebook is continuing to deal with sophisticated abuse on the platform following the 2016 presidential election, when the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency purchased ads on the site that ultimately reached as many as 126 million users. Facebook previously declined to say whether the activity it detected was also carried out by Russian agents, though the tactics were similar. The accounts typically operated under fake identities, posting incendiary comments around political and social issues and organizing real-world events.