
On Friday, Facebook said The BL would be banned from the social network. It is continuing to investigate “other links and networks” tied to The BL, he said.įacebook said the network had spent less than $9.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads. Gleicher said Facebook began its investigation into The BL in July, and accelerated its efforts when the network became more aggressive in posting this fall. The coordinated, inauthentic activity, Facebook said, revolved around the media outlet The BL - short for “The Beauty of Life” - which the fact-checking outlet Snopes said in November was “building a fake empire on Facebook and getting away with it.” technique did not actually make it harder for the company’s automated systems to detect the fakes, because the systems focus on patterns of behavior among accounts.īen Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, said that “we need more research into A.I.-generated imagery like this, but it takes a lot more to hide a fake network than just the profile pictures.”įacebook said the accounts masked their activities by using a combination of fake and authentic American accounts to manage pages and groups on the platforms. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said in an interview that “using A.I.-generated photos for profiles” has been talked about for several months, but for Facebook, this is “the first time we’ve seen a systemic use of this by actors or a group of actors to make accounts look more authentic.”


These networks can, through a process called machine learning, teach themselves to create realistic images of faces, even though they do not belong to a real person. They relied on a type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks. The people behind the network used artificial intelligence to generate profile pictures, Facebook said.

Facebook said on Friday that it had removed hundreds of accounts with ties to the Epoch Media Group, parent company of the Falun Gong-related publication and conservative news outlet The Epoch Times.
