The same Russian-linked trolls that were involved in the meddling of the 2016 Presidential election have been caught trying to gaslight Black people, specifically in America, using disinformation to provoke racial tensions.
Facebook and Twitter have deactivated numerous accounts connected to Russian-linked trolls that are based in Ghana and Nigeria, according to CNN. As a cover-up, Russian-linked actors set up a fake organization called EBLA, Eliminating Barriers for Liberation of Africa, to keep from being detected, according to the Washington Post.
The Verge reports that Facebook took down 85 Instagram accounts, 49 Facebook accounts, and 69 pages. About 13,500 accounts followed one or more of the disabled pages, about nearly 265,000 people were following one or more of the fake Instagram accounts. Twitter deactivated 71 accounts that had 68,000 followers. “This network was in early stages of audience building and was operated by local nationals — witting and unwitting — in Ghana and Nigeria on behalf of individuals in Russia. It targeted primarily the United States,” said Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote in a blog post.
Facebook deleted the accounts on grounds that the network violated its policies against coordinated, inauthentic behavior. The activity “was linked to individuals associated with the IRA [Internet Research Agency], an entity we had previously banned,” Gleicher wrote. Facebook also denied the network’s request to purchase or issue political ads in the U.S. “because the people behind it were not authorized to run political ads in the U.S.”
