Following a tip from the FBI, Facebook Inc. today said that its removed Pages and accounts linked to Russia’s infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency.

In a report, Facebook said it removed 13 Facebook accounts and two Pages that violated its policy against foreign interference through coordinated inauthentic behavior. The activity originated in Russia, with the focus mainly being on the U.S., the U.K., Algeria, Egypt and other English-speaking countries and countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The content came from fake accounts using fictitious personas designed to move traffic to a phony news organization. The accounts used fake profile pictures to hoodwink people into thinking they were genuine editors, but more worrying, U.S.-based freelance journalists were duped into writing stories.

People recruited were said to be on the left of the political spectrum, with some of the content that was posted related to social and racial justice in the U.S. Facebook said other stories centered on President Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris campaign, Julian Assange, QAnon, alleged Western war crimes, the coronavirus pandemic, migrants (n the U.K.), corruption, U.S. military policies, among other divisive topics.

Around 14,000 accounts followed one of more of the two Pages and $480 was spent of ads, paid for mostly in U.S. dollars. It’s reported that the Russian agency is again trying to help elect Trump by dividing Democratic voters on such issues.

One of the pages went under the name “Peace Data,” which described itself as an international news organization. The same outfit has also just had accounts suspended on Twitter and LinkedIn. On Facebook alone, it posted 500 stories in English and a further 200 stories in Arabic between February and August this year.

“These actors get caught between a rock and a hard place,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s cybersecurity boss, said in a press conference. “They can run a large noisy network that gets caught quickly, or they can work very hard to hide themselves, still get caught, and not get a lot of attention.”

Image: Facebook