Facebook identifies Russian operation that apparently sought to 'divide Democratic voters'

Russians are targeting the 2020 presidential election online, Facebook says — and they're getting "creative."

Facebook on Tuesday said it had removed accounts affiliated with a supposed independent news website apparently aimed at left-wing voters called Peace Data, which was run by people formerly associated with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll group that tried to influence the 2016 election, NBC News and CNN report. This network consisted of two pages and 13 fake accounts, according to The Washington Post.

"It confirms what I think we've all thought: Russian actors are trying to target the 2020 elections and public debate in the U.S., and they're trying to be creative about it," Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher told NBC News. "But the second thing that it confirms is, it's not really working." Gleicher said this more "subtle" Russian influence campaign didn't get "a lot of attention," and he also told Reuters, "I wouldn’t want people to think that this was a large, successful campaign."

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Facebook commissioned the analytics company Graphika to examine the operation, and Graphika head of investigations Ben Nimmo told CNN it appears its aim was "to divide Democratic voters, the same way the IRA tried in 2016." Peace Data did have actual American writers, who were reportedly recruited from a site advertising freelance gigs that didn't mention the IRA, per NBC. But some of the supposed editors were found to be fake, with deepfake technology being used to create their profile pictures, CNN reports.

This announcement from Facebook comes after intelligence officials said in August that Russians were "using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden" ahead of the 2020 election.