Creators of fake content on Facebook improve methods to avoid detection.
While the United States is improving its efforts to monitor and eradicate these actions, the fakers continue to refine their methods, say digital security experts. Ben Nimmo, a researcher at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, said he noticed that recently removed pages used more text copied from the internet than original language.
(Reuters)- Creators of fake news accounts and pages on Facebook are learning from their mistakes and becoming more difficult to track and identify, creating new challenges for the task of preventing the platform from being used for political disinformation, security experts say.
This became clear when Facebook tried to determine who created the pages that, according to them, aimed to sow discord among US voters before the November midterm elections. The company said on Tuesday that it had removed 32 fake pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram involved in what it called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
While the United States is improving its efforts to monitor and eradicate these actions, the fakers continue to refine their methods, say digital security experts.
Ben Nimmo, a researcher at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, said he noticed that the recently removed pages used more text copied from the internet than original language.
“Linguistic errors gave them away before, between 2014 and 2017,” Nimmo told Reuters. “In some of these more recent cases, it seems they realized this by writing less (original material) when publishing content. With their longer materials sometimes consisting only of content copied from some American website, this makes them less suspicious.”
Facebook's previous announcement in April regarding the issue of fake accounts directly linked a Russian group known as the Internet Research Agency to a myriad of posts, events, and advertisements that were placed on Facebook before the 2016 US presidential election.
This time, Facebook did not identify the source of the misinformation.
“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went much further to conceal their true identity than the Internet Research Agency has done in the past,” the social network said on its website Tuesday when announcing the removal of the fake pages. “Our technical expertise is insufficient to assign responsibility at this time.”
Facebook reported that it shared evidence linked to the latest flagged posts with several private sector partners, including the Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Facebook also said that the use of virtual private networks, internet telephony services, and domestic currency to pay for ads helped conceal the source of the fake accounts and pages. The perpetrators also used third parties, which Facebook declined to name, to publish content.
Top national security advisors to U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Russia is behind widespread attempts to interfere in the November elections and that they believe the Russians will continue trying to interfere in the 2020 elections.
Two US intelligence officials, who asked not to be named, told Reuters this week that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Russia was behind the latest Facebook campaign. However, one of them said that "the similarities, objectives, and methodology related to the 2016 Russian campaign are quite remarkable."
By Christopher Bing