Revelations of a new disinformation campaign suggest that Russia’s playbook for interfering with US politics has been adopted by other international actors and is being employed in political contexts beyond the US.
Facebook said on Tuesday that it had identified multiple new influence campaigns that were aimed at misleading people around the world, with the company finding and removing 652 fake accounts, pages and groups that were trying to sow misinformation.
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the aims of the latest campaigns appeared to be similar to those of past operations on the social network: to distribute false news that might cause confusion among people, and to alter people’s thinking to become more partisan or pro-government on various issues.
Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge, an organization that studies disinformation campaigns, said Iran’s involvement “reinforces that this is an ongoing information war, that our social ecosystem is vulnerable to manipulation by a variety of adversaries.”
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Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook was working with government agencies and private companies to proactively find malicious actors using the platform. He said the company had several investigations underway by a team dedicated to finding influence operations. He did not reveal the number or scope of the investigations, but said that given the amount of important elections happening worldwide, Facebook was looking at disinformation as a global problem.
“Authenticity matters and people need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Source: Facebook Identifies New Influence Operations Spanning Globe – The New York Times