San Francisco — Facebook has identified an ongoing effort to influence the US midterm elections, using inauthentic accounts and pages on the social network. "We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this," Facebook said on Tuesday in a blog post. "It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency has in the past." The company has stepped up its work to ferret out fake accounts after a Russian-backed effort sowed discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook and other social-media networks have been criticised by legislators for failing to recognise and take steps to stop those efforts. The new disclosure underscores the increasing difficulty of distinguishing real political discourse from content meant specifically to create dissension among Americans, even as Facebook invests h...

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