Facebook kills 270 Russian fake news accounts – and you’ll be able to check if you liked one
FACEBOOK has taken down more than 270 pages and accounts that were ran by Russia's digital propaganda department.
Billionaire boss Mark Zuckerberg revealed the major cull in a Facebook post where he blasted Russia's notorious Internet Research Agency.
Zuck accused the IRA of "interfering in foreign elections".
"This Russian agency has repeatedly acted deceptively and tried to manipulate people in the US, Europe and Russia – and we don't want them on Facebook anywhere in the world."
The 33-year-old said that after 2016, Facebook discovered that the Russian IRA had set up a network of hundreds of fake accounts to spread divisive content.
The social network has now removed 70 Facebook accounts, 65 Instagram accounts and 138 Facebook pages.
These propaganda pages were also running ads, all of which have been removed.
According to Facebook, more than one million users followed at least one of the 138 pages.
And just under 500,000 users followed at least one of the 65 Instagram accounts.
Alex Stamos, Facebook's security chief, said: "The IRA has consistently used inauthentic accounts to deceive and manipulate people.
"It’s why we remove every account we find that is linked to the organization — whether linked to activity in the US, Russia or elsewhere.
"We know that the IRA — and other bad actors seeking to abuse Facebook — are always changing their tactics to hide from our security team.
"We expect we will find more, and if we do we will take them down too."
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Facebook said that it would be releasing a tool to let you check if you liked or followed one of these dodgy propaganda pages.
The tool will go live in "the next few weeks".
You'll be able to find it here:
Do you think Facebook is doing enough to tackle fake news and trolling? Let us know in the comments.
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