NPR News:脸谱网和推特删除俄罗斯支持的账户 称其干预美国大选

With just weeks left until the election, more evidence is coming out about how Russia is again interfering. Facebook has confirmed that it has removed accounts linked to Russian state actors who were trying to spread false stories. Those stories were aimed at influencing the outcome of the November vote. NPR's tech reporter Bobby Allyn is covering this and joins us now. Good morning, Bobby.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: So tell us more. What exactly did Facebook uncover?
ALLYN: So this all started with a tip from the FBI. Federal authorities reached out to Facebook and said, hey, we found this site, peacedata.net, and it says it's an international news site, but if you look very closely, it sure does look like a Russian propaganda tool. So Facebook looked into it and, indeed, discovered that it was linked to Russian operatives, and it was sharing hundreds of bogus news articles about everything from racial injustice to the Democratic campaign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I talked to Ben Nimmo of research firm Graphika. They collaborated with Facebook on looking into this website. And Nimmo told me that the Russian operatives who were running it were posting articles on Facebook to groups liked by progressives.
BEN NIMMO: It was very much a strongly left-leaning constituency that they were aiming at. But in among there, there were indeed pieces which were saying, well, Biden and Harris, they're much too far to the right.
MARTIN: So they were trying to make progressives less likely to be supportive of the Biden-Harris ticket. How does that compare, Bobby, to what happened four years ago?
ALLYN: Researchers say, you know, this operation both echoes the 2016 playbook and introduces some new elements. So four years ago, Russian troll farms pushed false stories to suppress the progressive and minority vote to try to hurt Hillary Clinton. We're seeing that tactic again. It's a similar goal. What's new here is they duped Americans into helping them seem more credible. They posted writing gigs on hiring boards in the U.S. telling, you know, young and inexperienced journalists that, hey, if you want to make some extra money, you could come write for peacedata.net.
Here's Nathaniel Gleicher. He heads cybersecurity policy at Facebook.
NATHANIEL GLEICHER: And they used that to reach out to unwitting freelancers to essentially trick them into writing for this fake organization and writing on topics that the Russian actors wanted them to write on.

ALLYN: The thing is, Rachel, it didn't quite work. Facebook and Twitter both caught this very early on, and these pages never really gathered the reach that the Russian operatives had hoped. So the tech companies are saying, look — this is a success story.
MARTIN: Can they really bask in the success of this, though? I mean, there's all kinds of other disinformation on Facebook.
ALLYN: Yeah, that's right. I mean, it was identified and whacked before it reached millions of people. That is a good thing, right? But we know that Facebook has trouble controlling its platform, frankly. Whether it's violent militia groups that go there to organize or QAnon conspiracy theories, there's loads of troubling and, frankly, sometimes dangerous content on the platform. And sometimes that stuff, it slips through the cracks.
MARTIN: So they have been paying attention to this, though. They've talked a lot about their efforts to better moderate the content on their platform. Is any of that working?
ALLYN: You know, it's a constant game of cat and mouse. In 2016, the Russian meddling was so impactful because the Russian troll farms were able to build audiences over time, over many, many, many months. Facebook's Gleicher says Russians have some new tricks up their sleeve, but so too does Facebook.
GLEICHER: Russian actors trying harder and harder to hide who they are and being more and more deceptive to conceal their operations.
ALLYN: Yeah, so Facebook only started this investigation after the FBI told them about it. And before then, these pages were sharing on Facebook for three months, which in Facebook time is a very, very long time.
MARTIN: All right. NPR's Bobby Allyn. Thank you so much for your reporting on this. We appreciate it.
ALLYN: Thanks, Rachel.