These efforts go well beyond “fake news”, the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts that are used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion. In its effort to clamp down on information operations, Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France before the presidential election. The company also explained how it monitored “several situations” that fit the pattern of information operations during the US presidential election. This technique involved creating dedicated websites to host the stolen data and then creating social media accounts and pages to direct people to it. At the same time, a separate set of malicious actors created fake Facebook accounts to falsely amplify narratives and themes related to topics exposed in the stolen data.

Source: The Guardian April 27, 2017 20:37 UTC