Facebook announced that it had detected and blocked a disinformation campaign originating from Israel's Archimedes Group. The disinformation was related to political issues.
The Archimedes Group used Facebook to reach millions of people and influence public opinion. It had hundreds of pages and accountsthrough which it served its purposes.
The disinformation campaign targeted specific countries in Africa (Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger, and Tunisia), Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The people behind the disinformation campaign deceived their targets by posing as locals and bringing the conversation to specific political events, which they presented in the way they wanted, in order to influence people.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's chief security , said the platform removed 265 Facebook and Instagram accounts, Facebook Pages, Groups and events after it found coordinated inauthentic behavior. He added: "The people behind this network used fake accounts to run Pages, spread their content and artificially increase engagement."
After the discovery, Facebook blocked Archimedes Group (and everything related to it) from all its platforms.
Facebook released some information regarding the case:
- Archimedes Group had 65 Facebook accounts, 161 Pages, 23 Groups, 12 events and 4 Instagram accounts.
- The above pages and accounts had a great impact on the world. Approximately 2.8 million accounts followed some of the Pages and 500 accounts participated in at least one of these Groups. Regarding the 4 Instagram accounts, approximately 920 people followed some of the accounts.
- Archimedes Group had spent about $812,000 on ads . The first ad appeared in December 2012. The last one was in April 2019, shortly before Facebook decided to block everything related to this company.
- In the last two years, Archimedes Group has organized 9 events, with the most recent one scheduled for May 2019. Several people (approximately 2,900) had expressed interest in one or more of these events. The investigation showed that some of the accounts that had expressed interest were fake. It is also not known whether these events actually took place.
The large amount of money ($812,000) that Archimedes Group spent on Facebook ads shows the extent to which Facebook, and all social media platforms, can aid disinformation.
Facebook stated that Archimedes Group has violated the platform's policies multiple times, which is why it decided to ban everything related to this company.
