CNN:

People associated with the infamous St. Petersburg troll group that was part of Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election are trying to target Americans again, Facebook (FB) announced Tuesday after receiving a tip from the FBI.

The disrupted operation used fake personas including realistic-looking computer-generated photos of people, a network of Facebook accounts and pages that had only a small amount of engagement and influence at the time it was taken down, and a website that was set up to look and operate like a left-wing news outlet.

This is the first publicly available evidence that people connected to the Russian troll group, which is known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), are using unwitting Americans in an attempt to meddle with the 2020 election and stir discord.The operation seems to have been shut down before it could get much traction on Facebook or the rest of the internet. That mirrors what happened around the 2018 midterm elections, when — as far as is publicly known — the Russian trolls’ online efforts were halting and small. The trolls had far more luck gaining followers and engagement in 2016, though it is not known how much of an impact, if any, their work had on the election.

Facebook said it relied on technical indicators to make the link between this operation and the IRA. The company does not typically share those indicators publicly, as it has said in the past doing so could tip off bad actors to how it finds them, but they could include unique information tied to specific accounts or devices. Facebook said it shared information with the FBI.”This looks like an early-stage attempt to target left-wing audiences on a range of issues,” Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics company commissioned by Facebook to study the influence operation, told CNN Business Tuesday.