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Facebook announced Tuesday that the company had removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram for being involved in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" - posts relating to a series of protests slated for next week in Washington DC.
As part of its disclosure, Facebook released a selection of the posts, ads and events created by the fake accounts.
Facebook says that they are still investigating the accounts, but so far they know that the accounts posted a total of 9,500 times, paid for 150 ads (to the tune of roughly $11,000 total), and created 30 events since May 2017.
"In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these Pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017. The latest was created in May 2018," the company reports. Of the largest event created through Facebook, approximately 4,700 users said they were interested in attending, and 1,400 said that they would attend.
The ads, posts and events cover a range of hot-button political issues, including the anti-fascist movement, women's rights, and colonialism. Some were designed to stir political divisions ahead of the mid-term congressional election in November 2018, while others seem fairly innocuous.
Here are the examples of the posts that Facebook removed: