Facebook said on Tuesday that A Russian influence activity posed as an independent news source to target left-wing voters in the United States and Britain, including hiring freelance journalists to write about domestic politics. Facebook Inc (FB.O) said the project – which in the run-up to the November 3 presidential election focused partly on U.S. politics and racial tensions – centred on a pseudo-media organization named Peace Info.
Facebook said its investigation “found ties to individuals connected with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency,” a company based in St. Petersburg that U.S. intelligence officials claim was key to Russian attempts to manipulate the presidential election in 2016. As part of the action, Twitter said it had also suspended five accounts which it could “reliably attribute to Russian state actors.”
Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said his team was working on the tip of the FBI and disabling the accounts until they collected a broad follow-up to the web. Just 14,000 people followed one of the suspended accounts or more, he said.
