Facebook and Twitter said Thursday it had identified a campaign of inauthentic behavior coming from Russia-linked accounts in Ghana and Nigeria.
Angela Lang/CNET
Russia-backed actors are still abusing Facebook and Twitter, now from accounts run by people in Ghana and Nigeria, the social media giants said Thursday. The activity was part of an influence campaign that focused on posting about black history, civil rights and LGBTQ issues in the US, Facebook head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a blog post.
Gleicher said the company removed 49 accounts and 69 pages from Facebook, and 85 accounts from Instagram, which it owns. The pages had amassed about 13,500 followers and the Instagram accounts had about 265,000 followers. The majority of followers were in the US. Twitter said in a tweet that it also removed 71 accounts operating from Ghana and Nigeria.
“We recently suspended a small network of accounts largely Tweeting in English and that presented themselves as based in the United States,” Twitter said. Also working on the investigation was social media research firm Graphika, which published its own report Thursday, as well as academics from Clemson University and journalists from CNN.
A screenshot from a post on a Facebook page the social media company removed from the site. Facebook said Thursday it was part of a campaign of inauthentic behavior linked to actors in Ghana, Nigeria and Russia.
Facebook said it found the campaign was linked to an NGO in Ghana called EBLA. The CNN investigation, also published Thursday, said the Ghanaian group was based in Accra and had 16 people employed to post content to the accounts and pages. Facebook said the effort was tied to individuals associated in the past with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization that the US intelligence community says was behind much of the election interference activity on social media during the US presidential election in 2016.
The accounts didn’t appear to be posting about elections, Facebook said. In previous campaigns, fake accounts built up an audience by posting one kind of content, and then changed tack to other political topics, researchers in the US have found. Facebook and other social media companies including, Google (which owns YouTube), Twitter and Reddit have increased their efforts to identify campaigns run by networks of fake accounts since US intelligence agencies announced in 2017 that Russia had mounted an effort to influence the election.
“We’re constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity,” Gleicher said in his blog post, “because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”