Proud announcement from Facebook:

Today, we removed four separate networks of accounts, Pages and Groups for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram. Three of them originated in Iran and one in Russia, and they targeted a number of different regions of the world: the US, North Africa and Latin America. All of these operations created networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing. We have shared information about our findings with law enforcement, policymakers and industry partners.

We’re constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.

To which Charles Arthur comments: “I thought manipulating people was basically the point.” Which it is. It’s just that apparently some kinds of manipulation are verboten. And of course, as Charles says, this is just the stuff they’re catching.