MENLO PARK, CA — Facebook removed hundreds of pages on Thursday it said posed as independent news sites in eastern Europe and elsewhere but were actually run by employees at Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik.
Facebook said the 364 pages and accounts had almost 800,000 followers and had spent around $135,000 on ads on the platform between October 2013 and this month.
The countries targeted included Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia and Moldova. The pages frequently promoted anti-NATO sentiment and protest movements, Facebook said.
They also promoted almost 200 events. Facebook said it could not confirm if any of the events actually took place.
Sputnik’s partner company, RIA Global LLC, is registered as a foreign agent in the United States.
CNN has reached out to Sputnik for comment.
Another takedown
Separately, Facebook said it had removed another 107 pages, groups and accounts that were designed to look like they were run from Ukraine, but were in fact part of a network that originated in Russia.
“We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency activity,” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a post.
The company said those pages were found following a tip from US law enforcement.
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