Facebook has removed networks of accounts that are accused of coordinated inauthentic behavior and that are said to have attacked each other. The competing disinformation campaigns concentrated on the Central African Republic and had their origins in France and Russia, explains the social network.
It is the first time that such networks have been discovered that actively interact with each other and, for example, have accused each other of being “fake”. The responsible persons in France therefore used false accounts, while the campaigns controlled from Russia involved local users.
Fake accounts defame each other
While such allegations are not new to Russia, the one directed at France is more extraordinary. The backers tried to conceal their identity, Facebook says it has but found ties to individuals in the French military. In total, there are several dozen accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Some of the articles that have now been published are directed against Russia’s foreign policy. So far there has been no comment from France’s Ministry of Defense. The focus of the campaign was on the Central African Republic and Mali, but other former French colonies in northern Africa were also targets.
Meanwhile, Facebook attributes a few hundred blocked accounts on Facebook and Instagram to Russia and there individuals with previous connections to the Internet Research Agency, which is linked to attempted attacks on the 2016 US presidential election. Here, the social network has also determined that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on advertising on Facebook. Here, too, Facebook has published examples that are directed directly against France. According to the network, it also has examples of accounts in the opposing networks adding each other as friends and commenting on each other.
Facebook now publishes information on how to proceed against undesirable activities on its own platform with great regularity, which is often more or less directly attributed to nation states. Only a few days ago, the US company had the procedure against two groups in Vietnam and Bangladesh who used the infrastructure to spread malware and hack accounts. The target was, among other things, human rights activists, foreign governments and the media.
(mho)
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