Facebook bans dozens of Russia-linked accounts to stop manipulation during elections

Washington, April 4: Sighting the outlook to stop the malice of swaying public opinion on Facebook during the U.S. Presidential Elections, Facebook has announced that it has removed from multiple platforms accounts and pages controlled by Russia's Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency.

Stating and announcing the news from Facebook News, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said that the social media giant has removed almost 70 Facebook accounts and 65 Instagram accounts controlled by Russia's Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency. Apart from this 138 Facebook pages, which individual users can "like" or follow. Most of the pages ran advertisements and were targeted at Russian speakers. Uncovering these accounts took "months of work."

 

Further mentioning the details, Stamos said, "The IRA has repeatedly used complex networks of inauthentic accounts to deceive and manipulate people who use Facebook, including before, during and after the 2016 US presidential elections.” Facebook removed the accounts strictly because they were controlled by the IRA and not because of their content, he added.

Facebook will allow people to check if they liked or followed one of the banned pages in the coming weeks, Stamos said. The company expects to find more bad actors, IRA-linked and otherwise, on its platform and will remove their accounts too, he said.

Facebook says that its decision to ban the IRA didn’t actually have to do with anything the accounts were posting. Instead, it had to do with the fact that the agency set up “fake accounts” on Facebook to spread its propaganda.

This offers another example of why finding and removing accounts that deliberately spread misinformation, or deliberately try to stoke political fires, are not always removed. Facebook and Zuckerberg don’t want to make judgements about what these accounts post. They only wants to decide whether or not the accounts themselves adhere to the company’s user guidelines.