Facebook СЕО Mark Zuckerberg announced on April 4 that his social network had just deleted 270 accounts of Russian internet trolls who spread fake news – some of it about Ukraine.
The trolls worked for an organization called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which used to target people in Russia “and people speaking Russian in neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine,” Zuckerberg wrote. The IRA has been using complex networks of fake accounts, according to him, and it has repeatedly “acted deceptively and tried to manipulate people.”
So “we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “While we respect people and governments sharing political views on Facebook, we do not allow them to set up fake accounts to do this.”
About one million people followed at least one of IRA’s Facebook pages and about 500,000 followed at least one of the shadowy troll farm’s Instagram accounts. Zuckerberg called the shutting down of these 270 accounts “an important step to protect the integrity of elections around the world.”
Zuckerberg said that the pages and accounts that had been taken down today were removed because they were controlled by the IRA, not based on the content they shared.
According to Facebook, the Russian IRA had set up a network of hundreds of fake accounts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election. The social network company began investigating their activity globally and taking down their pages and accounts.
Zuckerberg said, “security isn’t a problem you ever fully solve,” and that “sophisticated adversaries” like the IRA are constantly evolving. That’s why Facebook plans to hire up to 20,000 people by the end of 2018 to work solely on security and content review at Facebook. Today it dedicated 15,000 employees to work on that.
“We’ll keep improving our techniques to stay ahead – especially when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections,” Zuckerberg said.
According to New York Times, the IRA is based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin also known as “Putin’s Cook,” who controlled two companies that financed the operations of the IRA.
Previously, the New York Times wrote of the IRA that “(the agency) churned out falsehoods on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. They promoted Donald J. Trump and denigrated Hillary Clinton. They stole the identities of American citizens. They organized political rallies in several states, and hired a Clinton impersonator for one event, in West Palm Beach, Fla.”
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