Facebook Inc. has removed two Russia-linked misinformation networks that used more than 500 fake accounts, pages and groups to target users.

Nathaniel Gleicher, the social media giant’s head of cybersecurity policy, announced the takedown today.

The larger of the two misinformation networks consisted of 289 pages and 75 accounts with undisclosed ties to Sputink, a news website owned by Kremlin media agency Rossiya Segodnya. The pages posed as news or general-interest sites to push posts about topics such as anti-NATO sentiment.

“The Page administrators and account owners primarily represented themselves as independent news Pages or general interest Pages on topics like weather, travel, sports, economics, or politicians in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan,” Gleicher explained in a blog post.

The operation reached a fairly significant number of people in these countries. Facebook found that about 790,000 accounts followed one or more of the pages in the network, while the operators of the network spent $135,000 on ads to further spread their content. The ads, which were paid for in euros, rubles, and US dollars, ran from October 2013 to this month.

The other misinformation operation that Facebook took down had a narrower geographic focus: it originated in Russia and targeted users in Ukraine. The network consisted of 26 Facebook pages, 77 accounts and four groups along with 41 Instagram accounts that had more than 235,000 combined followers.

Facebook was alerted to the operation’s existence by a tip from U.S. law enforcement. The company didn’t find any links between the two networks but did uncover similarities between the Ukrainian operation and an earlier campaign.   

“We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency (IRA) activity,” Gleicher wrote.

Today’s development comes days after Facebook removed a collection of accounts that were used to spread fake news in Bangladesh. The social network has been expanding its efforts to combat misinformation on its platform in recent quarters, but some critics still see a strong need for improvement.  

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