Facebook employees told reporters in a press call on Tuesday that they could not say if the company was run by the French military – they simply said it was run by “individuals” associated with the military.
According to Facebook, the operations targeted “the Central African Republic and Mali, and to a lesser extent Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria, C ડીte d’Ivoire and Chad.”
Facebook removed the accounts and also announced on Tuesday that it had deleted the accounts, despite being African, belonging to a Russian troll group.
In some cases, Facebook said, the fake French and Russian accounts also communicated with each other.
Elections are to be held in CAR later this month.
A post in French reads, “Russian imperialists have gangrene on Mali! Beware of tsarist lobotomy!”
Alleged Russian accounts, in turn, criticize the French.
“While we’ve targeted operations in the same regions in the past, this is the first time our team has received two campaigns from France and Russia – actively engaging with each other, including making friends, commenting and criticizing the opposition. Fake,” Facebook blog The authors of the post, Nathaniel Glitcher, head of security policy, and David Agranovich, who led the breakdown in the global threat, wrote.
Facebook said it had linked about 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages to alleged operations involving people linked to the French military. The company said the page had about 1,000 followers on Facebook.
Two separate networks of Russian pages, both allegedly linked to the Russian troll group, were also removed. Those pages had about 6 million followers, Facebook said,
Facebook now regularly announces the removal of a network of fake accounts that it can link to nation-states and other foreign entities.
CNN reached out to the French government to comment.
U.S. intelligence community assessments and U.S. Despite evidence from lawyers, the Russian government has consistently refused to use social media for foreign interference in this way.
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