Facebook said it had discovered the first co-ordinated disinformation campaign designed to influence the US midterm elections, but stopped short of identifying Russia as being behind the attempt to interfere in US democracy.
The social network has been working with the FBI on the attempted interference in the November vote, which follows its discovery of the Russian Internet Research Agency campaign to sow division in the US during the presidential election campaign in 2016.
The company removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they showed “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”, it said. Almost 300,000 people followed at least one of the pages, created from March 2017 to May 2018. They ran about 150 ads at a cost of around $11,000.