Facebook Removes 82 Accounts Linked To Iranian Disinformation Campaign

Facebook said Friday that it removed 82 pages, groups, and accounts from Iran that tried to sow political discord in the U.S. and U.K. over the course of the last year. USA Today reports: The Facebook announcement, coming two weeks before the midterms, was a bracing reminder of the growing scale and frequency of disinformation operations threatening the United States on social media, some of it tied to foreign governments, even as Facebook adds thousands of new employees and strengthens technology to more quickly root out and take down disinformation campaigns.

The page administrators and account owners typically misrepresented themselves as U.S. citizens, or in a few cases U.K. citizens, to post on politically divisive subjects ripped from the headlines such as the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Last week Twitter disclosed more than 1 million tweets from the same operation. The Iranian government has no ties to the accounts, but the investigation is still ongoing.

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