Facebook said it shut down a large network of fake accounts spreading memes and propaganda about U.S. politics that promoted Donald Trump and attacked his rivals.
In an unusual twist, some of the bogus Facebook accounts as part of the “coordinated inauthentic activity” ring used profile photos generated by artificial intelligence to create the appearance that the fake users were Americans, who then joined Facebook Groups to post political content, the company said.
According to Facebook, the network centered on U.S.-based media company The BL, whose bogus accounts had about 55 million total followers across Facebook and Instagram (most of which were outside the U.S.). The BL network, which was operated by individuals in the U.S. and Vietnam, was linked to Epoch Media Group, the publisher of the Epoch Times which is tied to the Falun Gong religious movement, according to Facebook.
“The BL is now banned from Facebook,” Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy, said in a blog post. “To evade our enforcement, they used a combination of fake and authentic accounts of local individuals in the U.S. to manage Pages and Groups.”
The BL operation spent less than $9.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads, according to the company.
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On Facebook, the account owners operating the The BL network “typically posted memes and other content about U.S. political news and issues including impeachment, conservative ideology, political candidates, elections, trade, family values, and freedom of religion,” Gleicher wrote.
Material that The BL’s fake accounts posted included: a link to an Epoch Times story, “Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Fires Top Official Following Complaints of ‘Inappropriate Behavior’”; a link to a Spanish-language website run by The BL that quoted Trump complaining about Rep. Adam Schiff; and a link to an article on The BL’s main site with the headline “Pelosi delegation visits Middle East without authority to negotiate with foreign leaders.”
The network comprised 610 Facebook accounts, 89 Facebook Pages, 156 Facebook Groups and 72 Instagram accounts that originated in Vietnam and the U.S. and focused primarily on the U.S. along with other users worldwide in Vietnamese-, Spanish- and Chinese-language posts, according to Facebook.
The BL’s pro-Trump network of Facebook accounts was first identified by Snopes last month. Meanwhile, Facebook had previously banned the Epoch Times from advertising on the platform, following an NBC News investigation in August revealing that the publication deceptively purchased $1.5 million in ads with pro-Trump messages.
In addition, Facebook announced Friday that it has shut down a smaller social-media-manipulation ring, originating from the country of Georgia, that used fake accounts to increase engagement on their pages, which masqueraded as “news organizations and impersonated political parties, public figures, activist groups and media entities.” The accounts on Facebook and Instagram had about 442,300 followers.
And separately Friday, Twitter announced that it disabled 5,929 accounts — which it linked to an operation backed by the government of Saudi Arabia — for violating its “platform manipulation” policies. Those represented the core of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged “in spammy behavior across a wide range of topics,” all of which have been permanently suspended, according to Twitter.