Facebook announced Monday evening that it had blocked 115 accounts on its services that may have been engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
The company said U.S. law enforcement notified Facebook on Sunday of the accounts’ online activity, saying they believed the accounts “may be linked to foreign entities.”
“Given that we are only one day away from important elections in the U.S., we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today,” the company said in its blog post.
The company blocked 85 accounts on Instagram and 30 accounts on Facebook. The Instagram accounts were in English while the pages associated with the Facebook accounts were in French and Russian, the company said.
Facebook said it would provide updates on the situation, including whether the accounts are linked to the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, once it knows more.
