Facebook Discovers New Inauthentic Campaign of US Midterm Elections. Facebook says it has discovered attempts to influence the elections held in November in the US.
In a message, Facebook says that it has removed 32 pages and profiles from Facebook and Instagram because they are guilty of ‘coordinated non-authentic behaviour’.
‘Our research is still at a very early stage, and we do not yet have all the facts’, Facebook admits.
So it is not transparent who is behind the accounts and pages. “It is certain that whoever set up the pages has made much more effort to conceal his true identity than the Russian Internet Research Agency did earlier at the time of the presidential elections in 2016,” said Facebook.
The goal seems obvious: to influence the interim elections held in November. At those elections – just halfway through President Donald Trump’s term of office – all seats of the House of Representatives and a third of the seats of the Senate are at stake. Some governors and other local representatives are also elected.
The pages and profiles with names such as ‘Black Elevation’ and ‘Resisters’ in the run-up to the election campaign strongly focus on subjects that actively divide US society and could be a decisive factor in the ballot.
This called for street protests against a meeting of the extreme right in Washington. This evokes memories of Charlottesville, where a meeting under the banner called Unite the right got out of hand last August and a counter-bidder was killed.
Other pages that were taken offline focused on abolishing ICE, the agency that deals with immigration and is committed, among other things, in the controversial separation of illegal immigrants and their children.
The messages on those pages were reminiscent of the divisions that were sown in the Black Lives Matter movement. A total of 290,000 people followed the relevant accounts.
Facebook has this week in a series of briefings in Congress told people’s representatives about the discovery campaign, writes The New York Times. There would also be cooperation with the FBI to investigate the activities.
