Thursday afternoon, Facebook announced the suspension of a network of accounts it said was engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram" that was "directed from Iran." Almost simultaneously, Twitter announced that it had suspended what it termed networks of accounts that it termed "foreign information operations" potentially connected to Iran, Venezuela and Russia. The hundreds of Russia-linked accounts it suspended had together sent almost a million tweets, many relating to US politics, Twitter said. The accounts appear at the moment to have been significantly less influential than those allegedly run by the Internet Research Agency during the 2016 presidential campaign. But they had tried to weigh in on the 2018 midterm elections; the accounts tweeted more than 73,000 times about those elections, Twitter said.

Source: CNN January 31, 2019 21:00 UTC