Facebook said on Monday that it had recently found and taken down four state-backed disinformation campaigns, the latest of dozens that it has identified and removed this year and a sign of how foreign interference online is increasing ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Three of the disinformation campaigns originated in Iran and one in Russia, Facebook said, with state-backed actors disguised as genuine users. The campaigns were aimed at people in North Africa, Latin America and the United States, the company said.
The posts crossed categories and ideological lines, seemingly with no specific intent other than to foment discord. Some of the posts touched on conflict in the Middle East, while others pointed to racial strife and some invoked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, according to examples provided by Facebook.
One of the campaigns focused more on the 2020 election. In that campaign, 50 accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a Kremlin-backed professional troll farm — targeted candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, according to an analysis from Graphika, a social media research firm. Roughly half of those accounts claimed to be based in swing states. The Internet Research Agency was also responsible for targeting the American electorate during the 2016 presidential election.