Meta/Facebook informs today the world about how its efforts are progressing to remove mass harassment networks from its platform. The social network released a new report saying that “closed” successfully a series of networks for Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB). But aside from the fake profile networks that operate together, the company has shed light on how it addresses additional threats. This includes Brigading and Mass Reporting, where Facebook's anti-harassment tools are used as a weapon. This is another step beyond the broader tactics the company announced in September, when it pledged to combat the broader social harms that were noted on its platform.
With Brigading, the company took down what it described as a “network of accounts originating in Italy and France” that targeted medical professionals, journalists, and public officials. Facebook says it monitored activity in a European anti-vaccine conspiracy movement called “V_V,” adding that its members used a large volume of fake accounts to “massively comment on posts” by individuals and news outlets “to intimidate them and suppress their views.” In addition, these accounts posted doctored images, superimposing the swastika on the faces of prominent doctors and accusing them of supporting Nazism.
In Vietnam, Facebook took down a network used to target activists and users critical of the local government. The network imposed “hundreds of reports against its targets through abuse reporting feeds.” The attackers also created duplicate user accounts and then reported the real account as an impersonator of the fake account. Facebook added that some of these fake accounts were automatically detected and disabled by the company’s automated moderation tools.
See also: Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram may not get end-to-end encryption by default until 2023
In terms of more old-fashioned Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior methods, the company took down networks in Palestine, Poland, Belarus, and China. The first was allegedly linked to Hamas, while the latter two were built to exacerbate tensions during the humanitarian crisis taking place on the border. Facebook said the Polish network had very good operational security and, so far, has not been able to link it to a real organization. The Belarus network, on the other hand, had much worse operational security, and so the company has linked the activity to the Belarusian KGB.
The latest network originating from China has prompted Facebook to publish all these details regarding its actions in case networks promoting conspiracy theories are detected! In its report, the company says that a group created a fake profile of a Swiss biologist named Wilson Edwards, who published material critical of the US and the WHO. What did the posts say? The false claims made by the “Swiss biologist” said that the US was interfering in the search for the origins of Covid-19 and was pressuring the WHO in an attempt to blame China.
See more details about the Chinese network: COVID-19: Facebook suppressed conspiracy theory from China
One thing Facebook identified is the use of guides that were employed to train potential members of the network. The V_V network, for example, posted videos on its Telegram channels that suggested users replace letters in keywords so they would not be detected by automatic filtering. Also, the people behind the Chinese network sometimes uploaded notes from their leaders, written in Indonesian and Chinese, which offered advice on the best way to strengthen this content.
See also: Facebook: Did it know its algorithm was promoting hate speech against people of color?
Additionally, Facebook announced that it has released a tool, via CrowdTangle, to give OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) researchers the ability to study misinformation networks. This includes storing any content that has been removed by the company, allowing a small list of approved third parties the opportunity to analyze it. So far, access has been limited to groups from the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Graphika and Cardiff University.
Facebook believes that publishing the details about how it finds these networks will allow OSINT community researchers to monitor them better in the future.
Source of information: engadged.com
