Facebook takes down 315 Pages, 152 accounts, 4 Groups, and 41 Instagram accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” originating in Russia
Top Takeaways Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends : Nearly a million Facebook users followed these fake Russian accounts Chris White / The Daily Caller : Here's The Twist Facebook Says Russia Is Putting On A Revamped Misinformation Campaign Tony Romm / Washington Post : Facebook disables hundreds of accounts tied to Russian news agency for hiding their identity Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today : Facebook Removes More Than 500 Pages and Accounts Linked to Russian-Originated Groups CBS San Francisco : Facebook Shuts Hundreds Of Russia-Linked Pages, Accounts Marrian Zhou / CNET : Facebook removes hundreds of fake pages, accounts tied to Russia Kelvin Chan / Associated Press : Facebook shuts hundreds of Russia-linked pages, accounts David Cohen / Adweek : Facebook Just Removed 2 Networks of Pages and Accounts for Inauthentic Activity in Russia Jen Thorpe / Geek News Central : Facebook Removed Inauthentic Behavior from Russia Ishita Palli / Reuters : Facebook blocks accounts linked to Russian state-owned Sputnik Stu Woo / Wall Street Journal : Facebook Pulls More Russia-Linked Accounts John Bowden / The Hill : Facebook takes down anti-NATO pages linked to Russia Arden Dier / Newser : Facebook Hits Fake News Linked to Russia, Sputnik Tweets: Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : The Sputnik connection in this Facebook takedown is important. This is the first evidence I've seen that Russian overt propaganda organizations are also participating in covert amplification.Congrats to @ngleicher and team and the folks at @DFRLab. http://twitter.com/... Matt Burgess / @mattburgess1 : Facebook just announced it's found more Russian disinformation campaigns. It's taken down 364 Facebook Pages (with a total of 790,000 followers). The pages had links to employees of Russian news agency Sputnik.... http://newsroom.fb.com/... Nina Jankowicz / @wiczipedia : THREAD! Today, Facebook announced the removal of HUNDREDS of fake accounts connected to the Russian state-funded propaganda arm Sputnik. The accounts posed as local news accounts and targeted users in Eurasia, with a large effort focused on #Ukraine. https://newsroom.fb.com/... Nina Jankowicz / @wiczipedia : (Another note that belies Facebook's lack of understanding of this issue: in their release, they refer to Sputnik as “a news agency based in Moscow.” ) pic.twitter.com/mt517bMhpd Nina Jankowicz / @wiczipedia : The Ukrainian pages were likely been slightly more difficult to detect, as they didn't link directly to Sputnik, at least in provided examples. But they bought $25k in ads, and with an election coming up March 31, I hope Facebook is a bit quicker on the uptake in the future. Nina Jankowicz / @wiczipedia : Facebook notes that it didn't look at the organic performance for any of the posts. As I've argued about the disinfo phenomenon in the US, this is a mistake. Once these fake pages have brand loyalty, they don't *need* ads anymore. They get audience engagement without them. Mark Di Stefano / @markdistef : Breaking: Facebook has just announced the removal of 364 Russian pages for “inauthentic behaviour” that are linked to employees of Sputnik - the Moscow news agency http://newsroom.fb.com/... Ben Nimmo / @benimmo : The network was cross-border, large-scale, and amplified Rossiya Segodnya content - mostly Sputnik, but also the TOK video service. Fake amplification, on an industrial scale. Detailed analysis here: http://medium.com/... Garrett M. Graff / @vermontgmg : Important point here: We talk about the Russia probe in the past tense, as if the 2016 election attack was a distinct event in time. It is not. Russia is continuing the same tactics, continuing the same attacks, to this day. Why? Because It still works. http://newsroom.fb.com/... Molly McKew / @mollymckew : Facebook removes network of accounts targeting former Soviet republics/captive nations with information operations, pushing anti-NATO messages, using anti-corruption as a theme. “News” operations linked to Sputnik. Accounts operated from 2013-2019 http://newsroom.fb.com/... Christopher Miller / @christopherjm : !! Facebook has “removed 364 Facebook Pages and accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior as part of a network that originated in Russia and operated in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries.” http://newsroom.fb.com/... Ben Nimmo / @benimmo : BREAKING: Facebook just took down 364 pages and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behaviour in the former USSR. Who was running them? Sputnik employees, that's who. http://newsroom.fb.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This takedown lands one day after Facebook's removal of 471 Pages and accounts from a separate Russia-origin network, making mid-January 2019 a two-day sweep rather than an isolated action. The pattern stretches back to the FireEye-tip investigation that surfaced 652 Pages and accounts out of Iran and Russia in August 2018, which established coordinated inauthentic behavior as a standing enforcement category rather than a one-off election cleanup.
What makes this round notable is scale of audience — coverage pegs followers of these fake accounts at close to a million — and the tie to Sputnik, which pulls a named state media outlet into the enforcement net alongside anonymous page operators.
First-order effects
- Roughly a million users who followed the 315 Pages, 152 accounts, 4 Groups, and 41 Instagram accounts lose their source of content overnight, and any Pages amplifying Sputnik-linked material are cut off from distribution.
- Facebook absorbs another enforcement burden on top of the prior day's 471-account removal, stretching its trust-and-safety operations across two back-to-back Russia-origin networks.
Second-order effects
- Iranian networks face the same dragnet within weeks — Facebook removes hundreds more Pages and accounts tied to Iran in February and then over 2,600 across four countries by late March — as investigators apply the same detection playbook across origins.
- Regulators and press now have a running ledger of takedown volumes to hold Facebook against, raising the cost of any perceived gap between what the platform removes and what it discloses.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds, coordinated inauthentic behavior enforcement hardens into a permanent reporting institution — confirmed when Facebook commits to publishing a monthly CIB report — turning episodic announcements into a measurable, comparable metric of platform integrity.
- State-linked media operating through page networks faces structural separation from organic reach, pushing influence operations toward harder-to-detect formats and keeping the arms race between platforms and operators permanent.
The trend: Platform counter-disinformation is shifting from reactive, headline-driven purges to an industrialized, regularly reported enforcement program spanning multiple state origins.