Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said on Sunday night that it had withdrawn a coordinated Russian-influenced operation that was aiming at the Ukrainians via Facebook and Instagram. The company said the disinformation campaign has links to another Russian network in the Donbas region that was previously banned from Facebook in April 2020.
In addition to the influence operation, Meta said it also eliminated a coordinated piracy group trying to target and compromise accounts in Ukraine.
“We have withdrawn this operation, blocked its domains from being shared on our platform, and shared information about operations with other technology platforms with researchers and governments,” said David Agranovich, Meta’s interrupt threat director. . he told reporters.
Agranovich 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 operated on fictional characters and were also active on YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and two Russian social media sites “to look more authentic” and “avoid scrutiny,” Agranovich said.
The operation also launched a handful of websites, Meta said, that would publish claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine is a failed state. Agranovich said the content created by the influencer was “mostly off our platform.”
“The idea was for them to write an article, post this article on their website as if they were a journalist or a commenter and then the accounts were designed to post links to their own websites and direct people off the platform,” he said. dir Agranovich.
Although Meta described the influence operation as a “relatively small network” consisting of about 40 accounts, pages and groups on Facebook, with less than 4,000 followers on Facebook and less than 500 on Instagram, the company did not say how many users interacted with. misinformation or how many times the posts were shared with others.
“What we’ve generally found is that the best proxy for the size of these transactions ends up being the number of people who follow them,” Agranovich said. “Overall, what we saw here was a very low level of sharing, posting, or feedback on any of the content that the network posted.”
Agranovich said Meta also detected attempts to “target people on Facebook and post YouTube videos showing Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including a video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers surrendering.”
Meta security chief Nathaniel Gleicher said a handful of prominent Ukrainian journalists, military and other public figures were also attacked on Facebook by a hacking group known as Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter typically addresses people via email and then uses the compromised information to access social media accounts.
“We feel like Ghostwriter successfully compromised some Facebook platform accounts,” Gleicher said.
Meta said it was encouraging users in Ukraine and Russia to take additional steps with their online security. Gleicher noted that to deter hackers like Ghostwriter will require users to protect all their devices and accounts on the Internet.
Earlier this week, Meta launched a “Block Your Profile” feature that allows users to block your Facebook profile with a single click. The feature prevents people who are not friends of a user from downloading, enlarging, or sharing the person’s profile picture. Meta said he hopes to implement this tool for users in Russia, as he has noticed “an increase in the orientation of protesters” in the country.
And while Meta has blocked monetization and ads from Russian state media entities, both in Ukraine and the United States, it has not yet closed accounts like RT and Sputnik that actively promote Kremlin-backed misinformation.
Gleicher said Meta has taken steps to “lower the content” shared on its platforms “to make sure that organic content is also not necessarily reaching the level of reach it might otherwise have had.”
On Friday, Meta’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said Russian authorities had ordered the company to stop checking facts and tagging Facebook posts of four Russian state media organizations. “We refused,” Clegg said, “as a result, they have announced that they will restrict the use of our services.”
Gleicher and Agranovich did not provide further details about Russia’s threats to restrict Facebook services, but Gleicher noted that “we have seen an indication that we will be strangled.” 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 have suggested that Meta 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 an independent source of information.”
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