The campaign spent about $973,000 in advertisements on Facebook and
Instagram before it was removed.



If you saw a comment on an article about mail-in voting in a swing state, there's a chance it
came from one of the 200 fake accounts Facebook removed in October. On Thursday, the
social network released its monthly coordinated inauthentic behavior report, including a
takedown on a US campaign in favor of the Trump administration.
The disinformation campaign came from Rally Forge, a US marketing firm working on behalf
of the conservative group Turning Point USA, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of
cybersecurity policy, said.


Rally Forge created 200 fake Facebook accounts, 76 Instagram accounts and 55 pages on
Facebook starting in 2018, and posted comments on political topics posing as real people
while using stock photos, Gleicher said.
Topics included the 2020 presidential election, COVID-19 and praise of President Trump. They
also posted comments in support of trophy hunting in Kenya. In one example comment, a
fake persona attacked the integrity of mail-in voting -- echoing disinformation campaigns from
foreign actors.


"Mail-in ballots are such a horrible idea. A dangerous amount of ballots will be lost or won't
arrive in time. The smartest thing to do is to vote in person," the fake personality said in a
Facebook comment on an article about mail-in voting in Iowa.
Rally Forge didn't respond to a request for comment.

"Turning Point Action works hard to operate within social platforms' [Terms of Services] on all
of its projects and communications and we hope to work closely with [Facebook] to rectify
any misunderstanding," Turning Point USA said in a statement.

Rally Forge has since been banned from Facebook, but Turning Point USA is still active on the
social network.

Their pages had about 373,000 followers on Facebook and 22,000 followers on Instagram,
and spent about $973,000 on ads before the takedown.

Gleicher said that many of these accounts had already been automatically removed by
Facebook's detection system, but would pop back up with slight variations of the names.

Other takedowns noted in Facebook's report on Thursday include campaigns in Myanmar
where the nation's military incited a genocide on the social network, and in Azerbaijan, where
the ruling political party used fake accounts to harass its opposition.



Source:
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-removed-hundreds-of-fake-accounts-tied-to-right-wing-groups/

My account no dey there
I still dey bomb steady