From today’a New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — On the same day Facebook announced that it had carried out its biggest purge yet of American accounts peddling disinformation, the company quietly made another revelation: It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government.

Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network.

“Facebook has reason to believe your work for the government has included matching photos from individuals’ personal social media accounts in order to identify them,” the company said in a cease-and-desist letter to SocialDataHub that was dated Tuesday and viewed by The New York Times.

The SocialDataHub action arrives amid a broader uptick in scraping-related enforcement across the platform’s advertiser base, with the company quietly pulling campaigns whose audience targeting relied on data sourced outside Facebook’s own systems. In one recent batch flagged by reviewers, ads for offshore gambling operators running British-targeted slogans such as “play differently — non Gamstop casinos the UK can’t block” were taken down after the company linked their audience lists to third-party brokers operating outside platform terms.