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Facebook just purged over 100 inauthentic accounts made by “foreign entities”

Hours before Election Day, Facebook announced that it learned about some likely malicious accounts.

Facebook just purged over 100 inauthentic accounts made by “foreign entities”

[Photo: Pixabay/Pexels]

BY Cale Guthrie Weissman1 minute read

Facebook last night published a blog post with an update about some potentially malicious behavior discovered on its platform. According to Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy, Facebook was contacted last Sunday by federal law enforcement about certain accounts that “may be linked to foreign entities.”

Gleicher and his team performed an initial analysis and discovered around 30 accounts on Facebook and 85 on Instagram that “may be engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” according to his post.

The Facebook accounts, he says, were generally either in Russian or French–the Instagram ones were mostly in English. They all are now blocked, along with the pages with which they were associated. The accounts seemed to vary in content; some focused on political topics, others on celebrities. Facebook says the investigation is still early, but it wanted to provide an update given today’s election.

For now, this is all we know. Facebook, it seems, is trying to be proactive in disclosing this information. It’s unclear how influential these accounts were, or what kind of role they played in foreign intrusion. We’ll have to wait and see if the company’s efforts to crack down on foreign intrusion has been successful.

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You can read the blog post here.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cale is a Brooklyn-based reporter. He writes about many things. More


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