“In total, our team has found and removed about a dozen deceptive campaigns connected to individuals associated with the IRA,” Facebook wrote in an update. “The IRA-linked campaign we removed in August was largely unsuccessful on Facebook, but it tricked unwitting freelance journalists into writing stories on its behalf.”

Similarly, Twitter said that it had identified five accounts it could “reliably attribute to Russian state actors,” which seem to have been associated with the same scheme. As on Facebook, Twitter says the accounts “achieved little impact on Twitter” and mostly posted spammy and other “low quality” tweets. 

The Tweets from the Russian-linked accounts were low quality and spammy, and most Tweets from these accounts received few, if any, Likes or Retweets.

The accounts achieved little impact on Twitter and were identified and removed quickly.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) September 1, 2020

But the company notes that the accounts, which were associated with a news website called “PeaceData” had hired freelancers to produce content. Twitter says that it will now block links to the PeaceData website and that “existing links will be de-amplified.” 

Both Twitter and Facebook said they were tipped off to the IRA activity by the FBI, which helped them shut down the accounts before they could grow their influence.