By Elizabeth Dwoskin & Tony Romm @ WashingtonPost.com, July 31

< illus. photo caption: Facebook said it deleted pages such as Resisters after it found they violate a ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior. (Courtesy of Facebook)

Lede:The social media company said it couldn’t tie the activity to Russia, which interfered on its platform during the 2016 presidential election. But Facebook said the fake pages and profiles it discovered shared a pattern of behavior with the previous Russian disinformation campaign.

Facebook has shut down a sophisticated disinformation operation on its platform that engaged in divisive messaging ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the company said Tuesday, an escalation of what a top executive described as an “arms race” to manipulate the public using its tools.

Facebook said it discovered 32 false pages and profiles that operated from March 2017 until this May, which lured 290,000 people with ads, events and regular posts on topics such as race, mindfulness and feminism — and sought to stir opposition to President Trump. The company deleted the profiles and notified law enforcement and lawmakers of the activity, as well the real Facebook users who were swept up in the operation.

One of the most popular pages had links to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin-backed organization of Russian operatives that flooded Facebook with disinformation around the 2016 election, Facebook said. Yet the operators of the newly banned pages, who Facebook said it was not in a position to identify, were more clever about covering their tracks [....]