Facebook took down more than 600 accounts tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy website The Epoch Times for using identities created by artificial intelligence to push stories about a variety of topics including impeachment and elections. The network was called "The BL" and was run by Vietnamese users posing as Americans, using fake photos generated by algorithms to simulate real identities. The Epoch Media group, which pushes a variety of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, spent $9.5 million on ads to spread content through the now-suspended pages and groups. "What's new here is that this is purportedly a U.S.-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content. We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past," Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleiche, said in an interview.

Facebook took down more than 600 accounts tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy website The Epoch Times for using identities created by artificial intelligence to push stories about a variety of topics including impeachment and elections. The network was called "The BL" and was run by Vietnamese users posing as Americans, using fake photos generated by algorithms to simulate real identities. The Epoch Media group, which pushes a variety of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, spent $9.5 million on ads to spread content through the now-suspended pages and groups. "What's new here is that this is purportedly a U.S.-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content. We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past," Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleiche, said in an interview.

Deepfakes are video manipulations that can make people say seemingly strange things. Barack Obama and Nicolas Cage have been featured in these videos. SAN FRANCISCO – When a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – one altered to show the Democratic leader slurring her words – began making the rounds on Facebook last week, the social network didn't take it down. Instead, it "downranked" the video, a behind-the-scenes move intended to limit its spread. That outraged some people who believe Facebook should do more to clamp down on misinformation.

The digital universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Thanks to the internet of things (IoT), broadband communications, cheaper cloud storage, and computation power, every organization, company, and government is generating reams of data about anything and everything. While this deluge of digital information provides unprecedented opportunities to improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of tasks, it also raises some distinct challenges. With so much traffic and a shorthanded cybersecurity industry, organizations are finding it harder and harder to secure their networks and data against cybercriminals. How to deal with security issues stemming from this growth of data will be a focal point of Global Cybersecurity Summit 2017, which will be held in the flashpoint city of Kiev on June 14-16.