Facebook closes accounts associated with campaigns to mislead by Iran and Russia

A group of accounts has been closed as part of a battle to combat misleading news before elections in the United States and elsewhere in the world, Facebook announced on Tuesday.

Facebook has closed more than 650 accounts, a page and a group defined as “a network of accounts misleading people”, said Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of the site.

The largest social networking site in the world said that as it continued its investigations and notified US law enforcement agencies, the content of some of these pages, some of which were linked to Iran and others linked to groups previously identified as linked to Russian intelligence operations, has been tracked.

“We think they were parts of two campaigns”, Zuckerberg said.

“These accounts, some of which are posted on the Instagram website, were presented as independent journalism or civil society groups, but in fact they were working with concerted efforts”, Facebook executives told a news conference.

The content posted by these accounts targeted Facebook users in Britain, Latin America, the Middle East and the United States, according to Nathaniel Glitscher, head of Facebook security policies at Facebook.

The investigation, initiated by Facebook, came after a warning from the electronic security company “Fire Eye” on a set of pages belonging to the “Liberty Front Press” media on the Blue and other sites.

Facebook is able to find a link between these pages and official Iranian media through registration information for websites available to all and computer addresses and information on page managers, according to Gleecher.

One example is Quest for Truth, allegedly belonging to an independent Iranian media organization, before being verified that it belonged to Iran’s English-language PressTV, which is linked to Iranian official media.

Liberty Front Press’s first account was created on Facebook in 2013, and it has been publishing political content that focuses specifically on the Middle East, Britain, Latin America and the United States.

Glitscher said Facebook also closed a set of pages and accounts linked to sources previously known by the United States as belonging to Russian intelligence.

“While these accounts were the same as some of the previous bad actors that we had closed because of cyber attacks before the 2016 elections, recent activities focused on politics in Russia and Ukraine”.

The accounts were linked to the “Insidia Media Center”, which was known by the Atlantic Council and other organizations as covertly disseminating pro-Assad and Russian content.

“We prohibit this type of behavior because credibility is important, and people need to trust what they see on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

In July, Facebook closed more than 30 fake accounts and pages that were implicated in what appeared to be a “coordinated” attempt to divert public opinion on political issues before the November midterm elections in the United States, without specifying the source of the pages.

The website pointed out that these “bad” accounts could not be linked to Facebook and Entrust in Prussia, which used the Facebook platform to publish misleading news before the 2016 presidential election.