On Friday, Facebook identified and deleted 82 accounts, groups and pages after determining they were part of an online influence operation based in Iran.
The Iranians operated 33 individual accounts and three groups, 30 Facebook pages, as well as 16 accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram, Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Facebook’s cybersecurity policy said in a statement on Friday.
Combined, the pages had more than 25,000 members and over 1.02 million followers, Gleicher said. In addition, 28,000 followed at least one of the 16 Instagram accounts. The network also hosted seven separate events, purchasing two ads on Facebook, spending less than $100 to promote them.
“The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as US citizens, or in a few cases UK citizens — and they posted about politically charged topics such as race relations, opposition to the President, and immigration. Despite attempts to hide their true identities, a manual review of these accounts linked their activity to Iran,” Gleicher said.
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