Ahead of US midterms, Facebook removes 30 accounts and 85 Instagram profiles

Facebook announced on Monday that it removed 30 Facebook accounts and 85 Instagram profiles for what the company has called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, said the company acted after receiving a report from US law enforcement on Sunday.

Gleicher said US authorities believed the online activity surrounding the reported accounts “may be linked to foreign entities.”

Facebook said that all the Facebook pages associated with the now-suspended accounts were in the French or Russian languages, while the Instagram accounts were mostly in English.

The company didn’t provide any other details, citing the early stage of its investigation.

“Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly,” Gleicher said. “But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the US, we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today.”

Gleicher promised to reveal more as their investigation advances.

Before yesterday’s recent accounts purge, Facebook had previously also banned Russian-linked accounts that attempted to sway the US midterm elections back in July, over 650 Russian and Iranian accounts in August, and another set of Iran-linked accounts in October, roughly ten days ago.

The US 2018 midterm elections are scheduled for today, November 6, 2018. At least three states have recently deployed National Guard cyber units to help election officials in the case of a cyber-attack.

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