Covert influence campaigns carried out by Russia and Iran have been repeatedly targeted by social media platforms over the years. The crackdown is the rare case in which a US-sponsored campaign aimed at foreign audiences was found to be in violation of company rules.
The accounts are being taken down at a time when the social media giants have tried to crack down on disinformation campaigns about the war in Ukraine. But much of this work has focused on Russian authorities’ bellicose efforts to promote propaganda about the war, including false claims of Ukrainian military aggression in the region or implicating Western countries’ complicity in the war.
Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company Meta, confirmed in a statement that the company recently removed a network of accounts originating in the United States for violating the platforms’ rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Franklin said it’s the first time the company has removed a foreign-focused influencer network that promotes the United States’ position.
Twitter declined to comment.
Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said in a statement that the Defense Department will “review and evaluate any information provided by Facebook.”
The accounts shared news articles from US government-funded media, such as VOA and Radio Free Europe, and linked to US military-sponsored websites to criticize the Kremlin’s occupation of Ukraine. The campaigns promoted the narrative that Russia was responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities just so it could pursue its “imperial ambitions,” the report said.
The campaign often mimicked strategies deployed by other countries such as Russia when seeking to influence public perception of world events. For example, the campaign created fake personas with digitally created photos, posed as independent media and tried to start hashtag campaigns, the report said.
Social media analytics firm Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which produced the report, noted that stealth campaigns didn’t always gain much engagement or traction online.
“Importantly, the data also show the limitations of using inauthentic tactics to generate engagement and build online influence,” the researchers noted. “The vast majority of posts and posts we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets.”
In the wake of the war, social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube banned or suppressed the accounts of Russian state media, restricted advertising and strengthened their fact-checking operations during the war. Traffic to Russian government-backed media channels on social media spiked in the first days of the invasion and then fell after the companies were cracked down, according to a March Washington Post analysis.
Since then, Ukrainian officials have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech, but many of the companies have failed to follow through, according to a recent report.
Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
