Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign

Facebook has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections. The company detected and removed more than 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. Facebook officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved. Facebook said that the accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and first discovered in July 2018. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages