The Russian troll farm is back to play on Facebook and meddle in the 2020 election; this time, the FBI stepped in and alerted the social media company.
“Peacedata” was presented as a “young non-profit media organization” in Romania that “focused on armed conflict, corruption, the environmental crisis, abuses of power, activism and human rights.”
But at a press conference tuesday, Facebook’s leading security officer Nathaniel Gleicher announced that social media accounts and used to expand their content were “connected to others related to the [Internet Research Agency],” the St. Petersburg-based troll farm..who exploited the fake social media personalities involved in Russia’s election interference in 2016.
While most of the website’s content was directed to foreign audiences in the UK, Algeria and Egypt, some of Peacedata’s troll content was addressed to the US.Hus And the 2020 election, adding the “Biden-Harris campaign, QAnon, President Trump and his policies,” according to Facebook.The content was aimed at users “mainly to the left of the political spectrum”.
After the FBI informed Facebook of the Russian government’s settlement of the Peacedata website, Gleicher said a corporate investigation had resulted in the suspension of thirteen accounts and two pages used to promote the site’s content.
Peacedata operators have tried to recruit unsuspecting freelancers to write content for the online page in Arabic and English, a tactic increasingly used through Russian-linked trolls in a multitude of African countries to cover up Russian propaganda.Other staff members of the online page were created from scratch type of synthetic intelligence called “antagonist generative networks”, digitally created photographs of other people that do not exist.
The website, created in February 2020, “in the early stages of building its audience” with about 14,000 subscribers in total, but only two hundred for its English Facebook page, according to the company.Peacedata trolls attempted to use classified Facebook ads.to succeed in a wider audience and spent around $480 on classified ads.
On the other hand, Facebook said it had suspended dozens of fake accounts and Facebook and Instagram pages executed through The Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm CLS Strategies for an unrecoated coordinated habit on behalf of a foreign entity.The CLS-related accounts published content “in the political opposition in Venezuela and the interim government in Bolivia, and denounced by Morena, a political party in Mexico.”
CLS Strategies recently registered as a foreign agent representing the Bolivian after the country overthrew its leftist president Evo Morales in November 2019.
The company spent $3.6 million on ranked Facebook and Facebook ads suspended a total of six accounts and 46 pages, as well as 36 other Instagram accounts that act as puppet socks.
In a press call with reporters, Gleicher said CLS would not be completely suspended from the Facebook platform, but that it would be subject to increased scrutiny for additional abuse.
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