In a move to eliminate fake news and fight state-sponsored phishing attacks on their respective platforms, Google, Facebook and Twitter announced that they had pulled a number of accounts linked to misinformation campaigns.
Most of them were based out of Iran and Russia.
Google removed 39 YouTube channels, as well as a bunch of Google+ accounts and Blogger blogs. The company said that it has notified a number of its users that appeared to have been targeted or come into contact with phishing attacks being run by those campaigns.
Facebook on the other hand, took down 652 pages believed to be connected to the campaigns, saying that the move has been attributed to four separate investigations.
As for Twitter, it suspended 284 accounts, saying that "Based on our existing analysis, it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran."
The companies have been working with FireEye which has been providing information on the Iran-based misinformation operations.
With "moderate confidence," FireEye explained that the Iranian-run efforts all appeared to be tied to a group called "Liberty Front Press."
Liberty Front Press was said to have used a number of pages disguised to look as if they had originated with various groups or individuals. But according to FireEye, the clues used to make that assessment could have been planted by someone else.
Later in a NBC News reports, it was stated that some Reddit moderators had spotted this misinformation effort for several months, but their reports were ignored.
After noticing certain Reddit users were posting divisive political content from some obscure news sites, moderator Alex Brown and a few others started investigating.
They started looking into websites' identification data and tracking IP addresses, and was able to determine that the websites were linked to Iran and were part of a propaganda effort. "I tried going to the admins," explained Brown. "These are hard examples of literal fake news, with clear evidence pointing to the Iranian government."
The group tried to notify Reddit employees fir about two dozen times, with the first attempt in July 2017.
"We are aware of recent reports of malicious actors on social platforms," said a Reddit spokesperson. "We are investigating our own site and, as we have done previously, will be transparent with our findings."
