Meta disrupts social media misinformation campaigns targeting Ukrainians
ABC News
Two social media misinformation campaigns exploiting tensions in Russia and Ukraine were identified and disabled on Facebook over the weekend.
A pair of social media misinformation campaigns exploiting tensions in Russia and Ukraine were identified and disabled on Facebook over the weekend, according to two senior leaders at the social network's parent company Meta.
One operation thwarted by Meta's security team involved about 40 accounts described as "inauthentic" with some profile pictures suspected to have been generated artificially, Threat Disruption Director David Agranovich said Sunday night. The fictitious personas operated across the internet, the Meta employees said, including on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and two Russian social media networks.
The campaign also included fake websites resembling news outlets that claimed to be based in Kyiv with the people behind the sites posing as news editors and expert sources.
The operation was connected to a campaign previously detected and taken down by Facebook in April 2020. At the time, the activity was found to have come from Russia, the Donbas region and two media organizations in Crimea.
