Facebook deletes 70 FB accounts, 138 FB Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by Russia's Internet Research Agency this morning, shares samples of IRA content
This morning we removed 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts — as well as 138 Facebook Pages — that were controlled by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Context & Ripple Effects
This takedown lands a month after researchers flagged that Facebook couldn't say how many people followed the IRA's deleted Instagram accounts — one found roughly 2.2M followers across just 27 of them. What's new today is disclosure: alongside the removals, Facebook is publishing samples of the IRA content itself.
The move opens a year of escalating enforcement. By August, Facebook had banned 32 Pages for behavior it said was far more sophisticated than the IRA's, then removed 652 Pages, groups, and accounts after a tip from FireEye led it to Iran-and-Russia operations — and the sweeps continued into 2019 with 471 more pages and accounts taken down.
First-order effects
- Russia's Internet Research Agency loses 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Pages, and 65 Instagram profiles overnight, cutting its reach on both platforms at once.
- Researchers and journalists gain direct access to the shared IRA content samples, an evidence base they previously lacked when auditing the earlier deletions.
Second-order effects
- External threat-intelligence firms become load-bearing for enforcement: the later FireEye-sourced sweep shows Facebook scaling takedowns beyond what its own detection surfaces alone.
- Every published sample raises the bar for the next operator — the August bans of 32 Pages explicitly cited actors better at covering tracks than the IRA, showing adversaries adapting to the disclosure loop.
Third-order effects
- 'Coordinated inauthentic behavior' hardens into a standing enforcement category with a repeatable cadence — hundreds of assets per sweep through late 2018 and into 2019 — rather than a one-off response to election interference.
- Platform transparency shifts from optional to expected: once Facebook sets the precedent of publishing takedown evidence, regulators and researchers treat that disclosure as the baseline for legitimacy.
The trend: Content moderation is shifting from ad-hoc account deletions to a recurring, evidence-publishing enforcement pipeline built on platform detection plus outside intelligence firms.