Facebook removes Russia-linked accounts targeting US from West Africa
Facebook on Thursday removed 49 accounts and 69 pages on its platform along with 85 Instagram makes up about participating in “foreign interference” in Ghana and Nigeria with respect to individuals in Russia, and generally targeting america, Facebook's head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a blog page post.
The blog page post said that 13,500 accounts followed one or more of these Pages and around 265,000 people followed one or more of the Instagram accounts, about 65% of which were in the US.
Facebook said that these accounts routinely posted targeting a US audience, posing as NGOs or personal sites and authoring black history, fashion, celebrity news, LGBTQ issues and events linked to famous Americans from history.
The posts raised suspicion as Facbook the network was linked to activity previously removed and related to EBLA, an NGO in Ghana, and people associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) in April, July and November of 2018.
The network that had been detected by Facebook had used fake accounts and coordinated with each other to mislead people in what these were doing, the business said. That behaviour was what led Facebook to action taken against them, instead of the content they posted, which handled police brutality, injustice and oppression, the blog said. The posts didn't directly talk about the united states election.
The info has been distributed to police, policy makers and other tech firms, Facebook said.
