The USA Presidential Election is only 26 days away now, Facebook’s efforts to remove examples of “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, and avoid a situation that happened in 2016 are pressing more than ever.
This week, Facebook has announced an update on removed accounts as a result of its detection processes that saw the removal of 3 Russian based networks late last month. They were linked to Russia’s Internet Agency, the group that is responsible for manipulating the US voters in the 2016 poll.
Will they be able to influence the polls again?
According to Facebook’s data, it is now detecting networks at a higher rate as per Facebook’s report, it deleted 4 separate groups of accounts were located on Russia in September, in a total of around 290 accounts and 20 groups, and not all these groups are focusing on the elections.
However, some of them were, and Facebook’s info shows that it has been able to remove these groups more successfully which may reduce the impact. Facebook has been also working with other platforms such as twitter to police such activities in a better way to lead for more improved results in this matter.
Also, to look at the total numbers, it seems to have suppressed any dash in manipulation leading into the poll.
As you can see in the charts above, we tracked the total accounts that Facebook has removed based on the reports when it was announced in their reports in March. We suspected that there would be an increase in removed accounts as the election is getting closer. However, that hasn’t happened, with the number of removed accounts staying stable, even decreased by time.
Indeed, that doesn’t mean that Facebook is detecting them all, as it cannot include these that it doesn’t know about. However, the statistics look like it shows that it has increased enforcements are generating results.
Hopefully, that will make the influence from the outside on the 2020 election less than the last time.
