MENLO PARK, CA — A thorough investigation from Facebook’s coordinated teams pinpointed “inauthentic behavior” from Iran on the social media platform, which affected more than a million accounts following these pages.

The company detected about 25,000 accounts joined at least one of these Iran-backed groups targeting citizens from the United States and the United Kingdom with “politically charged topics such as race relations, opposition to the president and immigration,” Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said. Some examples are shown here.

Given an election year, Facebook jumped on the first sign of sketchy, unethical practices, immediately launching a full-scale cyber probe. Over the past year, the social media giant has more than 20,000 people dedicated to these type of security measures, ranging from threat intelligence and data science to software engineering and research. The threat intelligence team was the first to pick up on the activity.

“Free and fair elections are the heart of every democracy, and we’re committed to doing everything we can to prevent misuse of posts,” Gleicher said.

Facebook’s whack-a-mole approach is critical to an authentic voting in the what is being considered a historic midterm election season.

Mike Hogan, Facebook’s Civic Engagement product manager, announced that 25 million people in the United States now follow at least one of their elected officials on the social media platform. In the past month alone, over 4 million citizens have commented on, reacted to or shared a post relative to these elected officials. More than a quarter of them have interacted with a state or local official.

The “War Room” at Facebook was developed to manage dashboards with real-time monitoring on key election issues such as voter suppression, floods of spam, foreign infiltration and unethical behavior labeled policy violations.

See also https://patch.com/california/.

–Images via Facebook press room