- Facebook and Twitter are said to have dismantled thousands of accounts and pages identified as being part of a global network seeking to push misleading pro-Trump messaging.
- NBC News reported that the Facebook accounts, which it said used fake identities run by people in Vietnam, had been linked to The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump conspiracy website.
- The Epoch Times was second only to the Trump campaign in pro-Trump ad spending on Facebook with $1.5 million before it was banned in August.
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Facebook is said to have removed more than 600 fake accounts linked to a website known to have pushed conspiracy theories in support of President Donald Trump.
NBC News reported Friday that The Epoch Times spent millions of dollars to run ads through the network of fake accounts, which apparently were created using artificial intelligence and were run by Vietnamese users pretending to be Americans. NBC News said the network also included 89 pages, 156 groups, and 72 Instagram accounts and amassed over 55 million followers on Facebook.
The network also appeared on Twitter, where a representative told The Wall Street Journal the site suspended approximately 700 accounts and was undergoing investigations into their origins.
Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, told NBC News that the company observed what it believed to be "a US-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content."
"We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past," Gleicher told the outlet.
The accounts pushed "anti-impeachment" and "pro-Trump" messages with AI-generated faces atop their profiles, which Gleicher said could be detected by the site's automatic monitoring for fake accounts.
This appears to be the latest run-in with Facebook by The Epoch Times since August, when it was barred from buying ads after it attempted to bypass its review system. Before the ban, The Epoch Times was one of the largest buyers of pro-Trump ads on Facebook, spending more than $1.5 million on pro-Trump Facebook advertising throughout 2019, second only to the Trump campaign itself.
Stephen Gregory, the publisher of The Epoch Times' US editions, said in a statement that the media group had no connection to the fake network, and he blamed some former employees.
The Epoch Times' official Facebook pages are still active and "verified" on Facebook, and its main account has nearly 6 million likes.
The Epoch Times is a nonprofit publication that's tied to a Chinese religious group named Falun Gong, which seeks to undermine the Chinese government and sees Trump as a useful tool.
News of the network comes with Facebook under mounting scrutiny for the abundance of misleading information and ads that thrive on the site, which is an especially concerning factor ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
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