Facebook’s parent company Meta said Sunday night it had rejected a coordinated Russian influence that was aimed at the Ukrainians on Facebook and Instagram. The company said the disinformation campaign was linked to another Russian network in the Donbass region that had previously been blocked by Facebook in April 2020.
In addition to the influence operation, Meta said it also thwarted a coordinated hacking group trying to target and undermine accounts within Ukraine.
“We have abolished this feature, excluded the sharing of their domains on our platform, and shared information about the functionality with other technology platforms with researchers and governments,” said David Agranovich, director of threat mitigation for Meta. he told reporters.
Agranovic said the coordinated campaign used fake accounts to target high-profile Ukrainians, including journalists, members of the military and public thinkers. Those behind the campaign had fake faces and were also active on YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and two Russian social networking sites “to look more authentic” and “to avoid scrutiny,” Agranovich said.
The company also had a handful of websites, Meta said, which would publish allegations that the West had betrayed Ukraine and that Ukraine was a failed state. Agranovich said the content created by the influencers was “mostly off-platform”.
“The idea was that they would write an article, posting that article on their site as if it were a reporter or commentator, and then the accounts were actually designed to post links to their own sites and direct people off-platform,” he said. Agranovich.
While Meta described the influence function as a “relatively small network” consisting of about 40 accounts, pages and groups across Facebook – with less than 4,000 followers on Facebook and not even 500 on Instagram – the company did not say how many users interacted with the misinformation or how many times the posts were shared with others.
“What we have generally found is that the best representative for the size of these functions ends up being the number of people who follow them,” Agranovich said. “Overall, what we saw here was a very low level of notifications, posts or reactions to any content uploaded by the network.”
Agranovic said Meta also spotted attempts to “target people on Facebook and post videos on YouTube depicting Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including a video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers surrendering.”
Meta’s security chief Nathaniel Gleicher said a handful of prominent Ukrainian journalists, the military and other public figures had also been targeted on Facebook by a group of hackers known as Ghostwriters. Ghostwriter usually targets people via email and then uses the compromised information to gain access to social media accounts.
“We have a feeling that Ghostwriter has successfully breached certain accounts on the Facebook platform,” Gleicher said.
Meta said it encourages users in Ukraine and Russia to take extra security measures online. Gleicher noted that preventing hackers like Ghostwriter would require users to protect all their devices and Internet accounts.
Earlier this week, Meta released the “Lock your profile” feature that allows users to lock their Facebook profile with one click. The feature prevents people who are not friends with a user from taking, enlarging or sharing the person’s profile picture. Meta said it expects to develop this tool for users in Russia, as it has noticed “increased targeting of protesters” in the country.
And while Meta has blocked revenue and ads from Russian state-run media outlets – including in Ukraine and the United States – it has not yet closed accounts such as RT and Sputnik that actively promote Kremlin-backed misinformation. .
Gleicher said Meta has taken steps to “downgrade the content” it shares on its platforms “to make sure that organic content does not necessarily acquire the level of approach it might otherwise have.”
On Friday, Meta’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said Russian authorities had ordered the company to stop checking facts and posting Facebook posts by four Russian state-run media outlets. “We refused,” Clegg said, “so they announced that they would restrict the use of our services.”
Glaicher and Agranovic did not provide further details on Russia’s threats to restrict Facebook’s services, but Gleicher noted that “we saw an indication that they would accelerate us.” He added that Meta believes that its platforms are still accessible in Russia, despite the lack of access to other social platforms such as Twitter.
Clegg also said that the Ukrainians proposed to Meta to remove access to Facebook and Instagram in Russia. But he said that “people in Russia are using FB and IG to protest and organize against the war and as a source of independent information.”
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