Facebook Takes Down Fake Account Network Used To Spread Hate In UK (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook has removed a network of more than 100 accounts and pages for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its social networks -- the first time it has done so for UK-based operations seeking to influence British citizens. The operation was spread over Facebook and Instagram and used a network of fake accounts to pose as both far-right activists and their opponents. It ran pages and groups whose names frequently changed in order to drum up more followers and operated fake accounts to engage in hate speech and spread divisive comments on both sides of UK political debate, Facebook says.

The pages, with names like "Anti Far Right Extremists", "Atheists Research Centre", and "Politicalized", attracted about 175,000 followers on Facebook, and a further 4,500 on Instagram, according to the company's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher. The pages shared content from mainstream news sources, such as the BBC and the New York Times, but also shared original content, even including administrators actively engaging in debate with users. "We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people," Gleicher said. "We're taking down these pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted. In each of these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.

Comments

Re:How Many More to Go

[religionofpeas]

It is almost like they could use their criterion for "fake account" to their own advantage.

Scary business!

[pigsycyberbully]

Scary business!

No such network exists it was individual people expressing their opinions. Facebook is deleting accounts because of legal action being taken against them in the U.S. by Tommy Robinson.
Because the government wanted to delete his webpage and because of the sting on the BBC they had to quickly silence everybody.

If you upload a picture of Tommy or his video they immediately delete your account. Facebook denies its previous statement it alleged that Tommy Robson, was telling people to cut off Muslims heads obviously that never happened that would be incitement to murder a criminal offence in the U.K..

These are very dangerous times in the U.K. I have never seen this before and I have lived in a few countries. This is dangerous.

The BBC are trying to hide this story which was published in the Guardian who tried to frighten Tommy Robson's children with a crackhead and filmed it live.

He has a court case against the police for harassment coming up soon. They are working out legal proceedings against Facebook in the U.S., they have served legal papers against the Guardian and the Socialist workers party. They have also serve legal papers against the Crown Prosecution Service. https://youtu.be/TdWahm2z_R0

He says the government not the Crown Prosecution Service are now charging him https://youtu.be/-RYmnsDeYTg

Tucker Carlson who works for Fox which is owned by Robert Murdoch who owns sky News enemy of Tommy Robertson slipped in an acknowledgement https://youtu.be/P6E1PFt8-a4

Re:Key wording

[DNS-and-BIND]

You are not talking about liberals, you are talking about leftists. Liberals believe in free speech. They might disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it. Leftists, on the other hand, will happily censor and we see this every day on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Quick question, how many offices, government and corporate, are held by these toxic rightists? How many people do they censor every day? Now compare this to the toxic left, which has real power. One need only look at the Covington kids to see how things turn out. The leftist view was "our reaction was factually wrong but morally right."