Facebook pages from Georgia, former Soviet countries removed for fraudulently boosting Kremlin outlet
The pages taken down by Facebook misled users on their purpose or location of their administrators while boosting the reach of the Sputnik news outlet.
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Facebook pages created for Georgia were among nearly 300 taken down by the platform on Thursday for misleading users about their origin and purpose while serving social media reach for Sputnik, a Kremlin media outlet.
An analysis of takedowns by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab said the hundreds of pages, removed for what Facebook calls "coordinated inauthentic behaviour", included those created for users in the country.
Pages ostensibly created on neutral subjects like "famous Georgians", as well as apparently fake personal accounts, actively shared material from Sputnik, increasing its user reach.
The network of the hundreds of pages spanned across 13 countries including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In aggregate, [the fraudulent pages] had 853,413 followers. [...] By comparison, Sputnik’s official pages across the same countries amassed 495,947 followers.
The inauthentic network therefore increased Sputnik’s reach by over 170 percent across the countries they covered," DFRLab said in its report.
Pretending to be managed in countries related to their subject themes, some of the pages were in reality run from Russia, according to the analysis.
The pages were also created in patterns that were "statistically improbable", such as the creation of a quarter of them in a single month of October 2017.
They reposted Sputnik content like weather forecasts to increase users for the outlet - which operates "in 31 languages, from Abkhaz to Vietnamese" - and for the video service TOK.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy for Facebook, reported the removal of pages in today's blog post titled Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior from Russia.
The parent company for Sputnik is Rossiya Segodnya (Russian for "Russia Today"), which, according to its charter, serves to "secure the national interests of the Russian Federation in the information sphere". Sputnik editors have denied that the charter applies to their outlet as well.
Facebook's takedown of the pages comes amid the network's recently ramped-up removal of fraudulent pages for "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" and wider work against "fake news" on the social media platform.
Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili has stated that Russian propaganda has achieved no success in Georgia so far.
Head of the National Centre of Disease Control (NCDC) of Georgia Amiran Gamkrelidze says that recent allegations of the Russian media and state officials regarding illegal experiments at the Tbilisi-based, US-built Lugar Laboratory are “unimaginable falsehoods and slander.”
Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze has stated that Russian propaganda and the information war is not a challenge only for Georgia, but also for European countries.
The Georgian government approved the Government Communication Strategy on Georgia's Membership to the EU and NATO for 2017-2020 at today’s governmental meeting.
In a statement released on December 20, Nathaniel Gleicher, the Head of Facebook’s security policy, explained that the people behind this activity used fake accounts to increase engagement on their content and manage pages.
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) has conducted its own research alongside Facebook’s investigation into the use of fake Georgian accounts to increase engagement with content and manage pages.
International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), one of the key Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) in Georgia, said that it has identified 14 fake news websites, 15 Facebook accounts, 50 pages and 35 groups spreading disinformation.
Facebook has removed over 500 pages, more than 100 accounts as well as groups and Instagram profiles engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" via sharing misinformation about Georgia's domestic politics and the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Democracy Research Institute has summarised the results of 11-month long monitoring of far-right groups disclosure on social platforms and online media, which revealed that nationalistic and anti-liberal content is especially popular among them. Nationalistic content is particularly characteristic for the following Facebook pages - ‘Turkey is an Occupier’, ‘Silenced Georgians’ and ‘Kardhu’, while anti-liberal content is popular among the followers of the pages - ‘Anti-liberal League’, ‘Alt-Club’ and ‘Geo Pepe.’
Georgian civil society and media representatives have urged Facebook to introduce mechanisms for determining the transparency of political advertisements, as pre-election campaigns will soon start in the country and political interest groups and foreign actors are ‘undermining the free, equal election environment by using disinformation’.