The following article by Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tony Romm and Ellen Nakashima was posted on the Washington Post website August 21, 2018:
Iran was behind a sprawling disinformation operation on Facebook that targeted hundreds of thousands of people around the world, the social media company said Tuesday night, underscoring Silicon Valley’s increasingly global war on disinformation.
The Iranian effort dated to 2011 and had ties to state media operations in that country, Facebook said, involving hundreds of accounts on both Facebook and its sister site, Instagram. The effort also spread to Twitter and YouTube, with accounts that both companies said they also removed. The fake Iranian accounts bought ads on Facebook and used it to organize events.
Facebook also deleted some unrelated fake accounts originating in Russia, which has been the main focus of reporting on disinformation operations targeting the United States. Tuesday night’s revelations were unusual, because the disinformation targeted people in many countries — in the Middle East and Latin America, as well as Britain and the United States, Facebook said — and involved a nation-state actor other than Russia.