The social media giant Facebook has announced that it has removed approx 700 pages, groups, and accounts from Bangladesh, Iran, Russia, Venezuela that have been engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior. The major difference between Facebook and Twitter lies in their methods of communication. This is because Facebook is meant to be more passive; in contrast, Twitter is an active form of social communication. Facebook also announced in a press release that the inauthentic campaigns mainly targeted in the Middle East and South Asia. According to the social media tech giant, approx 2 million people followed the pages, groups, and Instagram accounts. In a study conducted by Facebook revealed these accounts spent less than $30,000 on ads using “US dollars, UK pounds, Canadian dollars, and Euros. In fact, the Washington Post reported that Twitter identified inauthentic accounts that were linked to Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. These accounts were deleted as they were spreading false information and targeting U.S. midterm elections.
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Recently, the platform has removed approx 2,600 accounts that were tied to an Iranian campaign and targeting the midterms. Besides this, Twitter also said in a press conference that it removed 764 accounts that were originated from Venezuela and Russia’s information operations. The website also found the Venezuelan accounts tweeted about the midterms were also involved in a second campaign which was targeting their own country’s internal politics. Not only this, 400+ Russian accounts were also removed just prior to Election Day, but the website said it could not definitively tie the accounts to the Internet Research Agency. The head of Cyber Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher also said in a report that over 2 million accounts followed these pages on Facebook, 1600 accounts joined at these groups and more than 254,000 accounts followed such Instagram accounts. Gleicher said that the suspected pages hosted 8 events. The most surprising thing is 210 people expressed their interest in these events but the company said that “we can’t confirm whether any of these events actually occurred or not”. In present era of mobile app development, there is no competition between Facebook and Twitter as both are great for chats, communication and also help to boost engagement.
Yoel Roth (Head of Site Integrity at Twitter) said that they have identified and suspended a small number of accounts that were originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation. He also wrote in a blog post that the tweets were entirely in Bengali and only focused on regional political themes. Besides this, Twitter also suspended 3843 accounts from Russia and 764 accounts from Venezuela. Twitter also revealed in a press release that they have uncovered 418 accounts and they can’t render definitive attribution to the Russian Internet Research Agency. Facebook and Twitter, both are different social media platforms that are continuously making their efforts in removing pages, groups and accounts that are involved in inauthentic behavior.
