Facebook did not link the campaign to Russia (representation)
San Francisco:
Facebook said on Tuesday it derailed a nascent campaign of deception targeting the United States as it tried to gain momentum ahead of next week’s presidential election.
The effort orchestrated from Mexico has been published in English and Spanish on topics such as racial injustice; feminism and the environment, using a little bit of content published in the past by the Russian Internet Research Agency.
Facebook has not linked the campaign to Russia, saying it has so far traced control only to unspecified people in Mexico.
The network began creating accounts in April, hiding the identity and intent of those involved, according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s security integrity manager.
According to Facebook, it had grown to just two Facebook pages and 22 Instagram accounts.
Those responsible for managing the accounts or pages used in the “Coordinate Inauthentic Behavior” campaign claimed to work for what appears to be a fictitious Polish firm.
“Some of these testimonies were masquerading as Americans supporting various social and political causes and trying to contact others to amplify the content of this operation,” Gleicher said.
It was one of three small deception campaigns launched today on Facebook and Instagram, according to the social network and the latest in a series of efforts by the social network to block efforts to deceptively stimulate a candidate. or a political movement.
Each of the networks had few accounts and a negligible number of subscribers, which Gleicher said was a sign of Facebook’s success in catching such campaigns faster.
Catching coordinated deception efforts faster has sparked a shift in tactics to try and create a false impression that interference in voting or politics is more pervasive than it actually is, according to Gleicher.
Recent tactics have reportedly been to impersonate the media or to incite legitimate news agencies to amplify concerns about social ills or electoral security.
“We are seeing malicious actors attempting to play on our collective expectation of large-scale interference to create the perception that they are having more impact than they actually are,” said Gleicher.
“We call it perception hacking – an attempt to militarize uncertainty to create distrust and division.”
The tactic was used last week when culprits in Iran disseminated emails containing unsubstantiated allegations of hacking into U.S. voting systems and attempted to use Facebook to do the same.
“It’s important that we all remain vigilant, but that we also see these campaigns for what they are – small and ineffective,” Gleicher said.
One of the campaigns shut down on Tuesday was discovered while crawling the account created to spread the bogus claim of hacking.
“This small network originates from Iran and focuses primarily on the United States and Israel,” Gleicher said.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
