Facebook announced that it had pulled nearly three dozen accounts from its main platform and from subsidiary Instagram, saying the pages had engaged in the same sort of divisive political trolling that Russian operatives conducted during the 2016 election season. The company could not immediately identify who was behind the 32 accounts, but it said they had garnered hundreds of thousands of followers in their bid to sow discontent among voters.

The latest erased content, which Facebook said appeared on its platforms from March 2017 to May 2018, neither supported nor attacked specific elected officials or parties. Rather, the posts were designed to appeal to mindsets commonly associated with left-wing or right-wing groups on the American scene. In one case, a group calling itself Aztlan Warriors posted an anti-colonialist message that featured American Indian warriors such as Crazy Horse and Geronimo. In another, a page called Resisters plugged a supposed protest against a right-wing rally in Washington in August.

Facebook said that this kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because they don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing. Law enforcement officials and Congress were notified of Facebook’s steps, and authorities were provided with the information that triggered the removals, Facebook said. More precise identification of the perpetrators was not immediately available.

These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions the social media platform had taken to prevent abuse over the past year, Facebook said. Despite that careful language, Democrats seized on the announcement as support for their argument that Russia is attacking the U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saw the Kremlin as a culprit. Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, Mr. Warner’s counterpart on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Facebook’s move was a warning that the U.S. faces renewed dangers this year.

“It is clear that much more work needs to be done before the midterm elections to harden our defenses because foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016, he said. Facebook noted that it had found evidence of some connections between the 32 accounts and the Internet Research Agency accounts that were disabled last year, but it said the efforts made to scrub digital fingerprints from the fake pages and accounts might make it impossible to prove who was behind them.