Meta locates fake videos campaign in Russia – Economy

In February, Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine, but the war is not only raging on the ground and in the air. Russia is also doing everything it can to flood the Internet with false information. The scale of these campaigns makes clear a new report by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. “On our platforms we have identified and stopped the largest and most complex Russian disinformation operation since the beginning of the war,” says Ben Nimmo, one of the researchers involved. “She shows an extraordinary mixture of sophistication and mallet method.” The meta-networks were at the heart of the campaign. The group assigns her more than 1600 fake accounts and 700 pages on Facebook and almost 30 Instagram accounts. All detected accounts were deleted.

Dozens of websites imitated German media

The campaign focused on dozens of websites that imitated major German media. The SZ brand was also misused. At the end of August, research by ZDF and T-Online the manipulation attempts, after which Meta began his own investigations. Attentive SZ readers also informed the editors about the fake pages that they had discovered on Facebook. So far, it could only be assumed that Russian actors were behind the action, as the fake accounts only spread pro-Russian narratives. Videos and texts called for the sanctions against Russia to be lifted. Now Meta is committed: The campaign has its origins in Russia.

Such clear assignments are rare. Traces can be erased and wrong tracks laid on the web. Therefore, in the case of cyber attacks or disinformation campaigns, a lot of evidence is needed to name the authors. “We combined different signals,” says David Agranovich, who is responsible for digital security at Meta. “Some are technical in nature, others are related to the behavior of the attackers. Sometimes they also made mistakes.” Even when asked, he does not go into further detail, but says: “If we publicly attribute such operations to a country, we have to be sure. That’s us.”

Meta points the finger at Russia, but is reluctant to make specific allegations. The report leaves open whether state hackers from the secret services, the government or voluntary nationalist hackers were involved. However, there are indications that the operation at least had government support. The more than 60 replica websites were professionally faked. The creators spent more than 100,000 euros on advertising on Facebook and Instagram alone. For ordinary criminals, this effort would be unusual, especially since no financial motive is discernible. The creators were not concerned with tapping data or passwords, but with propaganda.

The message: Ukraine bad, Russia good

Meta-analyst Nimmo says: “It was a big operation with a small thematic focus. The messages can be summed up in a few words: Ukraine bad, Russia good, stop sanctions.” The campaign started in May in Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain and Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, the makers shifted their attention completely to Germany. They registered more than 60 domains similar to those of real media, such as sueddeutsche.me and sueddeutsche.cc. There they created articles and videos that spread the propaganda. The links were then shared across thousands of social media accounts. In addition to Facebook and Instagram, traces can also be found on Twitter, Telegram, the Russian site Livejournal and the petition platforms Change.org and Avaaz.

As great as the effort was, the procedure was amateurish. Although the fake pages testified to technical expertise, the network through which the links were distributed was set up amateurishly and was easy to recognize, says Nimmo: badly fake accounts, clumsy German, links posted in the comments in large numbers and with little subtlety. The majority of the accounts had already been automatically removed before Meta became aware of the campaign through media reports. The counterfeiters’ dilemma: “On the one hand, they didn’t want to attract attention, on the other hand, they wanted the propaganda to reach as many people as possible. As far as we know, that didn’t work on our platforms.” In addition, attentive readers of the real media quickly noticed that they were fakes. They sounded the alarm.

The entire network collected only a few thousand followers, most of the comments did not receive any likes. It is not possible to reconstruct how many people reached the fake pages and how many were unsettled or changed their minds. Nevertheless, the campaign shows how many resources Russia invests in the digital information war. For users, this means: read carefully and take a close look.