Facebook Has IDed Ongoing Political Influence Campaign In Midterms

Here we go again.

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified an ongoing political influence campaign on its platform ahead of the November midterm elections, and has removed 32 pages and accounts “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant’s announcement came minutes after the New York Times reported that Facebook officials have been briefing lawmakers on this activity in a series of meetings on Capitol Hill this week.

As in 2016, this year’s effort is centered around divisive social issues. Among the most influential accounts nixed from the platform were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters,” according to Facebook. The Resisters page partnered with five authentic U.S. progressive groups to organize an Aug. 10 rally marking the one-year anniversary of the deadly white nationalist “Unite the Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, Facebook announced.

These so-called “bad actors” also shared memes criticizing colonialism and sexism, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf, according to Facebook.

Facebook said it wasn’t clear if Russian intelligence officers were behind these efforts, but that “whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.”

As part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, a federal grand jury in Washington D.C., in February indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for a systematic effort to interfere with the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump. The IRA’s campaign involved creating hundreds of bogus social media accounts, some of which promoted false claims that Democrats committed voter fraud.