CALIFORNIA (Washington Insider Magazine) – Twitter and Facebook claimed they removed 2 anti-Ukrainian “covert influence operations” during the weekend, one linked to Moscow and another to Belarus.
One of the programs, a propaganda campaign including a website promoting anti-Ukraine discussion points, was a spin-off of a notorious Russian propaganda operation. A Facebook official stated the company employed computer-generated identities on numerous platforms, such as Instagram, to boost the legitimacy of fictional columnists.
According to NBC NEWS, the other campaign exploited stolen accounts to spread identical anti-Ukraine material and was linked to a recognized Belarusian hacker gang.
Russia is anticipated to continue to find ways to distort perceptions regarding Ukraine, according to propaganda analysts, particularly surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statements.
Twitter and Facebook took down networks that promoted storylines that Putin himself highlighted in his speech declaring a military campaign that has now grown into a large-scale attack.
The news also shows that Russia is still employing propaganda tactics initially uncovered during the 2016 election, but with certain improvements, including the use of computer software that can generate realistic and unique human faces.
According to Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s chief of security policy, the greater of the 2 propaganda groups operating in Russia, and the Russian-dominated Crimea and Donbas territories of Ukraine, and it is linked to the online platforms News Front and South Front, which the US administration has identified as part of a wider propaganda effort with ties to Russian intelligence.
The websites carried articles such as “Why Ukraine will only get worse” and “Zelensky is building a neo-Nazi dictatorship in Ukraine,” which pushed Russian talking points. The bios and computer-generated identities of the columnists were still shown on the websites as of Sunday night, with links to their profiles on VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook counterpart.
The profiles were a minor component of a broader persona-building effort that expanded throughout Russian social networking sites, Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram, according to Facebook, which removed 40 profiles linked to the propaganda campaign.
On Sunday night, accounts linked to the sites were still live on Russian social media platforms such as Instagram and Telegram. YouTube has declined to comment on the matter.
More than a dozen accounts linked to the South Front and News Front Russian operations were banned from Twitter for spreading links to a new disinformation site named Ukraine Today.
It permanently terminated well over a dozen profiles on Feb. 27 and prohibited the sharing of many links for violating the platform’s spam and manipulation policies. The investigation is still underway, but preliminary findings suggest that the links and profiles originated in Russia and were intended to disrupt public discussion about the current crisis in Ukraine, according to a Twitter spokesperson.
Facebook claimed it deleted a different multipronged misinformation effort targeting Ukrainians run by a recognized hacker gang located in Belarus. According to the firm, it hacked social media profiles to distribute pro-Russian misinformation.
The hackers used hijacked email account credentials to login into the Facebook profiles of local government officials, journalists, and army personnel in Ukraine. The hacked profiles would then broadcast a video of a Ukrainian holding a white surrender flag, which they claimed was a fake.
The hacker organization Ghostwriter was blamed by Facebook for the attempts, which has previously exploited hijacked accounts to spread disinformation in support of the Belarus government. According to cybersecurity firm Mandiant, the Ghostwriter hacking gang operates for the Belarus government.
