WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued the following statement today after Facebook announced that it had removed 652 fraudulent Iranian-backed pages, groups, and accounts from Facebook and Instagram — as well as a number of pages, groups, and accounts linked to Russian military intelligence from Facebook. This announcement comes just weeks ahead of the September 5^th open hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee with the leadership of Facebook, Twitter, and Google on the subject of social media manipulation.

“This is further evidence that foreign adversaries are actively using social media to divide Americans and undermine our democratic institutions. I’ve been saying for months that there’s no way the problem of social media manipulation is limited to a single troll farm in St. Petersburg, and that fact is now beyond a doubt. We also learned today that the Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook from 2016. While I’m encouraged to see Facebook taking steps to rid their platforms of these bad actors, there’s clearly more work to be done. I look forward to questioning the leadership of Facebook, Twitter, and Google about this at the Intelligence Committee’s hearing on September 5^th.”

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