Facebook has removed 2,632 groups and accounts that the company defined as operated in a "coordinated, suspicious manner," the social media giant announced Tuesday.
The company said that the suspicious accounts were suspected of having links to Iran, Russia, Macedonia, and the Republic of Kosovo.
"The accounts operated in a coordinated manner and employed methods of intentional obfuscation to prevent the identity of their operators or the actors behind them [the accounts," a Facebook statement read.
The accounts deleted that were suspected of having ties to Iran also reportedly had ties to Israel. According to Facebook, 513 of the Iranian accounts had been operated from various countries, including Israel, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Italy.
The administrators of the groups generally represented themselves as local media personalities and focused on news items, such as sanctions against Iran; India-Pakistan tensions; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Aside from the accounts believed to have been run by Iran, 1,907 of the accounts could be traced to Russia.
Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said that a few of the accounts had been operated by people who "engaged in inauthentic behavior." This is a definition that Facebook formerly used to describe attempts by Russian trolls to influence the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Gleicher said that rooting out such activity was an "ongoing challenge, because the operators are compensated generously for their activity."
The accounts were simultaneously removed from the Instagram app.
