As the midterm election season in the United States gets underway, so does the online activity surrounding these elections. Meta claims that it simply halted campaigns to influence them.
Meta announced in a post on Tuesday that two unconnected networks connected to China and Russia had been removed due to "coordinated inauthentic behavior." This behavior includes using both genuine and fictitious user accounts to trick users of the platforms and to hide who is behind Facebook pages. Meta prohibits such conduct on its platforms.
Although similar influence campaigns have been discontinued by the social media giant in the past, these two particular networks stand out. Meta claims that the China-based network was the first to target domestic politics in the United States. The Czech Republic was also the target of the campaign because of its support for Ukraine during Russia's war in the country. "We played both sides of U.S. debates," Meta's Global Threat Intelligence Lead Ben Nimmo said in a tweet thread. Nimmo explained that this network's accounts and pages would promote pro-gun and anti-abortion content to make themselves appear conservative. The same network would then post content advocating for pro-choice policies and gun control laws.
According to Meta, the Chinese network failed to attract a following, and some of the users who did engage with its content even referred to it as "fake." Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even two Czech platforms were included in the network.
Meta claims that the Russian network was the largest influence operation it had discovered coming from the nation since its invasion of Ukraine in February. The ongoing war was the primary topic of that campaign. Users in Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine were its primary markets.
The Russian operation employed "sophistication (language skills, investment in spoof websites) and smash-and-grab social media tactics based on volume," as stated by David Agranovich, Director of Threat Disruption at Meta. More than sixty bogus websites were included in the campaign, all of which attempted to impersonate major European news outlets like Spiegel and The Guardian. These fictitious posts supported Russia in the war and criticized Ukraine. The network also shared original memes and videos from YouTube and other social media platforms like Telegram and Facebook. Even links from LiveJournal, a popular American blogging platform in the 1990s, were posted by the Russian campaign. In 2007, a Russian media company purchased LiveJournal.) It also provided links to petition websites like Avaaz and Change.org. Meta explained that the Russian campaign was the "largest and most complex" known operation originating in Russia this year, despite the fact that none of the social media accounts had more than a few thousand followers.
These influence operations offer a glimpse into what might be coming in the future, despite the fact that neither the Chinese nor the Russian campaign appeared to be very successful. In Russia, for instance, Meta has been eliminating inauthentic coordinated behavior networks for years. It's clear that the bad guys behind these campaigns think they're worth it.
blogpay
Total Comments: 0