Facebook announced that they have removed approximately 500 pages and accounts that were believed to have been operated by Russian agents. The accounts and pages involved had a combined follower base of more than 900,000 people and had spent over $160,000 on advertising space on Facebook. The accounts and pages appeared to be working on two separate operations. One group was focused on spreading misinformation throughout Eastern Europe; the second group was much more targeted and focused nearly all of their efforts on spreading misinformation in the Ukraine. The tactics utilized by the second group mirror those of Russia’s International Research Agency (IRA), the same group which was found to be behind the misinformation campaign targeting the 2016 Presidential election. While Russia has always denied every allegation of attempts to tamper with elections or spread misinformation, they have also been open about the fact that they do operate “troll armies.”
