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Facebook has removed a network of accounts that originated in Pakistan and focused on both its domestic users and accounts in India.
The social network took down 453 Facebook accounts, 103 Pages, 78 Groups and 107 Instagram accounts in August for violating the company’s policy against coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB).
CIB is different from fake news as the content shared by these Groups or Pages may not be false, but they are shared to deceive users.
“When we take down one of these networks, it’s because of their deceptive behaviour. It’s not because of the content they are sharing,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy, explained in video about CIB.
The Pakistan-linked accounts that Facebook removed relied on fake accounts to post content and manage fan Pages and Groups of Indian military.
“The vast majority of the accounts, Pages and Groups engaged in coordinated reporting of content and people that were critical of Pakistan’s government or supportive of India, and some engaged in spam,” Facebook said in its August 2020 CIB report.
The now removed accounts used browser extension to automate reporting and primarily posted regional news content in English or Hindi.
Posts from these accounts included India’s policies toward China, the Indian military, criticism of the Indian government and its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Facebook also found that one or more of these Pages to have been followed by 70,000 accounts. And over a million accounts joined these Groups on its platform, and another 11,000 users joined the fake accounts on Instagram.
CIB in Russia and the US
Facebook has also removed two networks of fake accounts, Pages and Groups connected to Russia and the US that targeted at people outside their countries.
The social network took down a network of 13 accounts and two pages linked to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA). The IRA is known for its interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.
Unlike in the past, this time around, the IRA-linked campaign had tricked some freelance journalists into writing stories on its behalf, Facebook noted in the report.
On network originating the US, the social network has removed 55 accounts, 42 Pages and 36 Instagram accounts linked to US-based strategic communications firm CLS Strategies that focused primarily on Venezuela, Mexico and Bolivia.