February 15, 2019
Facebook has removed 783 Facebook and Instagram accounts tied to Iran that appeared to be engaging in a manipulation campaign targeting Americans and people in at least 25 other countries.
Separately, Twitter has announced that since last September it has closed 2,617 Iran-linked accounts it accused of election meddling. It said it removed most before Election Day.
Some of the Facebook-banned activity had been on Facebook since 2010, according to a statement from Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook.
The actors all followed the same playbook. They presented themselves as locals in a country and posted commentary that was re-purposed from Iranian state media on controversial topics, including Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, Gleicher said in a blog post.
It wasn’t the content that drove Facebook to take action. It was the fact that the content-writers pretended to be people they were not.
“In this case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action,” Gleicher said.
Facebook estimated that 2 million people followed at least one of the removed Facebook pages. More than 254,000 people followed at least one of the Instagram accounts.
Less than $30,000 was spent on ads linked to the accounts, according to Facebook’s review. The groups also hosted eight events, but Gleicher said there was no way to verify whether they actually took place.
While a manual review was able to link the accounts to Iran, Gleicher stopped short of saying who in Iran might have ordered the campaign.
It’s not the first time Facebook (which owns Insta-gram) has detected this type of activity and traced it back to Iran. Last October, Facebook said it removed 82 pages, groups and accounts that originated in that country and were engaging in coordinated, “inauthentic” activity.
While the social network has made progress in its quest to root out fraudulent activity, the fake pages seem to sprout like weeds as bad actors adjust their tactics in hopes of staying one step ahead of Facebook.
