Meta reviewing additional steps against Russian misinformation
Meta has removed a network in Russia saying it was repeatedly reporting people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them. The company´s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said that the company is “actively now reviewing additional steps to address misinformation and hoaxes coming from Russian government pages”.
Clegg´s statement was made in connection with the company presenting its quarterly adversarial threat report. The report talks about multiple policy violations in Iran, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, South America and the Philippines.
”In many of these cases, threat actors targeted multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, VK and OK, in addition to running their own websites and compromising legitimate sites.”
Meta´s summary:
- In Iran, action against two cyber espionage operations. The first network was linked to a group of hackers known in the security industry as UNC788. The second was a separate, previously unreported group that targeted industries like energy, telecommunications, maritime logistics, information technology, and others.
- In Azerbaijan, removed a hybrid network operated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs that combined cyber espionage with CIB to target civil society in Azerbaijan by compromising accounts and websites to post on their behalf.
- Update on enforcements in Ukraine, including attempts by previously disrupted state and non-state actors to come back on the platform, in addition to spam networks using deceptive tactics to monetize public attention to the ongoing war.
- Under Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, removed a network in Russia for abusing reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them.
- In South America, removed CIB operations from Brazil and Costa Rica and El Salvador. The Brazilian network is the first operation we’ve disrupted that primarily focused on environmental issues.
- In the Philippines, as part of disrupting new and emerging threats, removed a coordinated violating network that claimed credit for bringing websites down and defacing them, including those of news entities. Under our Inauthentic Behavior (IB) policies, also took down tens of thousands of accounts, Pages and Groups around the world for inauthentically inflating the distribution of their content and abusive audience building, including in the Philippines.
Moonshot News is an independent European news website for all IT, Media and Advertising professionals, powered by women and with a focus on driving the narrative for diversity, inclusion and gender equality in the industry.
Our mission is to provide top and unbiased information for all professionals and to make sure that women get their fair share of voice in the news and in the spotlight!
We produce original content, news articles, a curated calendar of industry events and a database of women IT, Media and Advertising associations.
