A June morning at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
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In a display of even-handedness, Facebook and Twitter have taken down a series of accounts that have for five years been engaging in pro-Western propaganda.
Twitter said the accounts violated its policies on platform manipulation and spam, while Meta described them as ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’.
Following the takedown of the accounts during this month and last, data was handed over to social media analytics firm Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory for analysis.
The accounts were found to be targeting users in the Middle East and central Asia with narratives promoting the interests of the US and its allies, while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran.
They heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities committed by its soldiers following the invasion of Ukraine in February this year. Some also promoted anti-extremism messaging.
“We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western influence operations on social media to be reviewed and analyzed by open-source researchers to date,” the researchers say.
“With few exceptions, the study of modern influence operations has overwhelmingly focused on activity linked to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, with recent growth in research on the integral role played by private entities. This report illustrates the much wider range of actors engaged in active operations to influence online audiences.”
The pattern of activity indicates a series of campaigns over a period of almost five years, rather than one homogeneous operation. However, say the researchers, they’re similar to propaganda campaigns seen before.
They involved fake personas with faces created by generative adversarial networks, along with fake media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos. Their creators attempted to start hashtag campaigns and launched online petitions – all tactics observed in past operations by other actors.
The Twitter dataset covered 299,566 tweets from 146 accounts between March 2012 and February 2022, and fell into two broad categories. The first was linked to an overt US government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiativ. The second consisted of a series of covert campaigns ‘of unclear origin’ that were also represented in the Meta dataset of 39 Facebook profiles, 16 pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts active from 2017 to July 2022.
The researchers haven’t identified the origin of the campaigns, although Meta suggests the US, and Twitter the US and UK. However, they don’t appear to have been particularly successful.
“Importantly, the data also shows the limitations of using inauthentic tactics to generate engagement and build influence online,” the researchers say.
“The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19 per cent of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers.”
This article links to a state controlled Russian media. 
