On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it has found a coordinated political influence campaign that seems directed at the November elections, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages.
The eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts were created between March 2017 and May 2018, according to The New York Times. Facebook told legislators on Capitol Hill that it could not tie the fake accounts to Russia, but they believe Russia was likely involved.
Over 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the created pages, according to Facebook.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the fake accounts resembled those used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency in 2016, but the recent efforts were better disguised. Facebook stated:
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. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that’s ever done. We face determined, well-funded adversaries who will never give up and are constantly changing tactics. It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too.
Some examples of the influence campaign included anti-Trump material and racially-charged posts; one, called “Resisters,” promoted a fake anti-right wing protest in August in Washington, D.C., according to The Daily Mail. Others featured anti-Trump memes, such as urging Trump to resign.
On July 13, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, stated:
It was in the months prior to September 2001 when, according to then CIA Director George Tenet, the system was blinking red. And here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.