In a rather unusual move, Facebook has “removed hundreds of fake accounts, pages and groups” connected to the Tel Aviv-based firm Archimedes Group, which claims it can “change reality,” reported The Wall Street Journal.
The social-media giant announced on Thursday that it eliminated “a network of 265 accounts, pages and groups, including 65 Facebook and four Instagram accounts, that posted content primarily pertaining to elections and other political activity in Africa, as well as Latin America and Southeast Asia,” which altogether was followed by around 2.8 million people,” according to the Journal.
“The people behind this network used groups of fake accounts to run pages, disseminate content and to act to artificially increase engagement and make the content more popular than it was,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy.
Graham Brookie, director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., told The Times of Israel that the Israeli firm is “a real communications firm making money through the dissemination of fake news.”
“Our team assessed that because this group is primarily organized to conduct deceptive behavior, we are removing them from the platform and blocking them from coming back,” said Gleicher.
