Facebook announced that it has removed 265 Facebook and Instagram accounts, Facebook Pages, Groups and events involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior”
According to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy in a statement, “This activity originated in Israel and focused on Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia along with some activity in Latin America and Southeast Asia.”
He added that “The people behind this network used fake accounts to run Pages, disseminate their content and artificially increase engagement. They also represented themselves as locals, including local news organizations, and published allegedly leaked information about politicians. The Page administrators and account owners frequently posted about political news, including topics like elections in various countries, candidate views and criticism of political opponents.”
Facebook says that some of this activity was linked to an Israeli commercial entity, Archimedes Group. It says the group repeatedly violated our misrepresentation and other policies, including by engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior.
This organization and all its subsidiaries are now banned from Facebook, and it has been issued a cease and desist letter.
- Presence on Facebook and Instagram: 65 Facebook accounts, 161 Pages, 23 Groups, 12 events and four Instagram accounts.
- Followers: About 2.8 million accounts followed one or more of these Pages, about 5,500 accounts joined at least one of these Groups and around 920 people followed one or more of these Instagram accounts.
- Advertising: Around $812,000 in spending for ads on Facebook paid for in Brazilian reals, Israeli shekel, and US dollars. The first ad ran in December 2012 and the most recent ad ran in April 2019.
- Events: Nine events were hosted by these Pages. The first was scheduled for October 2017 and the most recent was scheduled for May 2019. Up to 2,900 people expressed interest in at least one of these events, and a portion of their accounts were previously identified and disabled as fake. We cannot confirm whether any of these events actually occurred.
Six of the African countries have already held their elections. Only one country, Tunisia, is expected to hold its national polls later this year.
