Facebook has identified a coordinated political influence campaign ahead of the US midterm election, set to take place in November, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. According to the newspaper, the campaign was carried out with the help of numerous inauthentic accounts.
The tech giant is expected to reveal its findings on Tuesday afternoon, the report added, citing its sources.
Earlier, the company stated in a press release that they had removed the accounts suspected of participation in the campaign.
"Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior," the release said.
The bad actors went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) did in the past, the release said.
Facebook said that despite concerted efforts since then to disrupt such activities, the company still faces determined and well-funded adversaries who are constantly changing tactics. The company is investing heavily in more people and better technology and is working much more closely with law enforcement to counter such threats, the release said.
"We have invested heavily in people and technology to detect inauthentic attempts to influence political discourse, and enforcing our policies doesn’t require us to confidently attribute the identity of those who violate them or their potential links to foreign actors," the statement said.
The social media company was also reportedly entangled in the US election scandal after allegations emerged that it placed Russia-sponsored ads that sought to manipulate the outcome of the election.
Russian officials have repeatedly rejected the allegations that Moscow tampered with the 2016 US election as unfounded.
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