Meta recently deleted several accounts linked to the US military on Facebook and Instagramafter finding that they were being used as part of a secret propaganda plan against the Middle East and Russia.
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Meta, a social media monitoring company, removed 39 Facebook accounts, 26 Instagram accounts, 16 Facebook pages and two Facebook groups for violating its policy on “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The most successful of these Facebook pages had 22,000 followers; the most extensive group had 400 members, while one of the banned Instagram accounts had 12,000 followers
The network , which is linked to individuals in the US military, operated on multiple online services and focused its efforts on Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia , Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen,” the statement said .
After independent researchers from Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory published a five-year overview of pro-Western covert influence operations in August 2022, Meta launched an internal investigation that led to the identification of these inauthentic accounts.
The disinformation network operated in groups that promoted specific topics that corresponded to the public interest from specific countries.
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Users created fake profiles of locals in various countries, using images generated by GAN tools to avoid detection through reverse image search.
Some of the banned Pages had their own logos and distinct visual style, which matched the accounts they were associated with on YouTube, Twitter, Vkontakte, and other sites.
The telltale sign that these were fake accounts was that they were posting during US instead of the time zones of the countries in which they were supposedly based.
The organizers of these webinars posted in Arabic, Farsi, and Russian to express their admiration for the American military and highlight concerns about terrorism in areas of particular importance.
The fake accounts spent $2,500 on ads to ensure more people would see their misinformation.
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The campaigns often targeted Russia, China, and Iran, talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China, the way both countries support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and Iran's influence in the Middle East.
