META Meta Platforms Inc

By Robert McMillan and Deepa Seetharaman 

Facebook Inc. said it discovered a new group of accounts that engaged in coordinated political agitation and misinformation efforts ahead of November's midterm elections, in an echo of Russian activities on the platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

The social-media giant on Tuesday said it removed 32 pages and accounts from its main service and Instagram photo-sharing app that were created between March 2017 and May of this year. The pages and accounts -- which include such names as "Aztlan Warriors," "Black Elevation" and "Resisters," and largely targeted causes on the left -- collectively created more than 9,500 posts and were followed by more than 290,000 other Facebook accounts. The accounts also promoted 30 real-world events.

The revelation shows how Facebook continues to struggle with preventing misuse of its platform despite waves of criticism and the company's repeated pledges to address the problem. In a conference call, Facebook executives credited some of the measures they have taken over the last year with helping detect the new crop of bogus accounts, but acknowledged that they identified them only two weeks ago, about 15 months after the accounts started buying ads.

The disclosure also raises the specter of ongoing interference in U.S. politics just over three months ahead of the midterm elections -- and five months after special counsel Robert Mueller secured indictments against a group of Russians for using Facebook and other social-media platforms to sow discord in the U.S. around the 2016 campaign. Those accounts, orchestrated by a Russian group called the Internet Research Agency, agitated over politically divisive issues and bought more than 3,000 ads.

"Security isn't a problem you ever completely solve," Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. "We face sophisticated and well-funded adversaries, including nation states, that are always evolving and trying new attacks. But we're learning and improving quickly too, and we're investing heavily to keep people safe."

Facebook last week said efforts to clean up its platform -- the company is doubling the number of people tasked with policing content -- and to better protect users' privacy have contributed to slowing growth. That sent its shares down about 19% in a single day, erasing $119.1 billion in market value. Facebook shares closed up nearly 1% Tuesday at $172.58.

Executives on Tuesday said Facebook doesn't have enough evidence to assign responsibility for the latest bogus accounts. They said the creators took great care to cover their tracks, using virtual private networks and internet phone services and routing ad purchases through third parties. Facebook has informed lawmakers, other tech companies, and government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they said. The FBI declined comment.

Several lawmakers pointed the finger at Russia.

The new activity is "further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation," said Sen. Mark Warner (D.,Va.). Mr. Warner credited Facebook for coming forward and added that he expects the company and other internet platform operators to work with Congress "on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future."

"I am glad to see that Facebook is taking a much-needed step toward limiting the use of their platform by foreign influence campaigns," said Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The goal of these operations is to sow discord, distrust, and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system. The Russians want a weak America." He said more needs to be done to battle foreign interference on social media.

Russia has denied that it attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Facebook said that there was evidence connecting the accounts to the previous Russian activity, including that a known IRA account holder was a co-administrator of one of the newly deleted pages for seven minutes. But there were also differences. For example, the IRA accounts sometimes appeared to connect with Facebook directly from computers based in Russia, whereas that was not the case with the new accounts, Facebook said.

The banned accounts -- which included 17 profiles and eight pages from the platform's main app, along with seven Instagram accounts -- ran 150 ads costing approximately $11,000 between April 2017 and June of this year.

As with the IRA accounts, some in the new batch orchestrated events involving real people. In all, they organized or promoted about 30 events, dating back to May 2017, one of which attracted the interest of 4,700 Facebook accounts, with 1,400 saying that they would attend.

A page called "Resisters," one of the most popular of the group, created an event page on Facebook for a protest planned for Aug. 10-12 called "No Unite the Right 2 - DC" that enlisted support from people and from five legitimate Facebook pages. Resisters, which described itself as "feminist activism against fascism" promoted the event as a protest of a right-wing event planned for Washington, D.C., next week called "Unite the Right."

The latest behavior "correlates heavily with behavior we saw from IRA accounts in 2014 to 2017," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which examined some of the Facebook pages before they were taken down. Some of the latest posts contained messages disparaging President Trump, and overall they "preyed on very real and very organic sentiment in the U.S.," he said.

That amounts to a win-win tactic for a disinformation campaign, Mr. Brookie said: If discovered, the campaign undermines legitimate political protest; if undiscovered, the activity foments dissent.

Some researchers said Facebook took too long to take down the newly discovered pages. "It's understandable that the scale of the problem is huge -- but the budgets of social media firms are also massive," said Sam Woolley, director of the digital intelligence lab at the think tank Institute for the Future and an expert in computational propaganda.

Facebook said some of its new security measures prevented the bad actors from placing ads. "When we look at the advertising that these actors engaged in from what we can see, they attempted to run one ad after our ads tool was in place. That ad did not run and they made no further attempts," Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters Tuesday.

--Byron Tau contributed to this article.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 31, 2018 20:11 ET (00:11 GMT)

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