Social media sites Facebook and Twitter have removed several accounts related to Bangladesh for manipulation.

Facebook said on Thursday (Dec 20) that it has removed nine pages and six accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour on its Bangladesh platform.

“Through our investigation, which began in part based on a tip from Graphika, a threat intelligence company that we work with, we discovered that these Pages were designed to look like independent news outlets and posted pro-government and anti-opposition content,” its Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a post on Facebook Newsroom.

Sharing its finding, the social media giant said in the post that about 11,900 people followed at least one of these Facebook Pages.
The pages spent around $800 in advertising on Facebook. The first ad was run in July 2017, and the last was run in November 2018.
It also shared some of the sample posts of pages removed, which included ‘bdsnews24.com’, ‘BBC-BANGLA’ and ‘newsdinraat24.com’.

Our investigations are still ongoing & our enforcement actions could expand. However, at this point, we have taken action on a total of 15 accounts.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 20, 2018

Twitter said it suspended 15 accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation.

“Working with our industry peers we identified & suspended a very small number of accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation,” it tweeted.