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Facebook reveals evidence to Congress of new disinformation campaign ahead of midterm elections | TheHill

posted onAugust 1, 2018
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Article snippet: Facebook has revealed a new coordinated disinformation campaign ahead of November's elections that used dozens of fake accounts and pages on its platform. The company said it has removed 32 pages and accounts across Facebook and Instagram involved in "inauthentic behavior" after discovering them last week. It has briefed lawmakers on its discoveries and has been working with the FBI on the matter since discovering the accounts last week. “We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts — including who may be behind this,” Facebook said in a post. “But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change,” it added. The news of the coordinated campaign is likely to raise new fears of interference in this fall's midterm elections, which are already taking place in the shadow of the fight over Russian interference in the last election. Facebook told lawmakers in a series of briefings this week that the new efforts could have been conducted by Russia but that it has not been able to confirm this, according to a report in The New York Times. Facebook said in its post on Tuesday 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." The Kremlin-... Link to the full article to read more

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