The Company Says The FB Account Network Targets India, Latin America, And The United States.
Key Sentence:
- He added that they are trying to get influential people to spread false claims to undermine public trust, especially with the Covid-19 vaccine.
In its latest news on "coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook said it found a link between the network and a botched disinformation campaign by influential marketing agency Faze, part of a Russian company called AdNow.
Last month, the Trending investigation reported that in May this year, Faze was offered money by influential people to spread false claims about the risks associated with Pfizer's vaccine.
Their investigation found that the same network had been trying since November 2020 to falsely label the AstraZeneca vaccine as harmful due to the use of a harmless adenovirus obtained from chimpanzees.
A Facebook post featuring a Planet of the Apes photo with a Hindi speech bubble mentioning AstraZeneca. Planet of the Apes to create the impression that a vaccine would turn humans into monkeys. This post appeared on Facebook in Hindi when the Indian government was discussing emergency approval for the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The campaign uses fake accounts that Facebook says may have come from record farms in Bangladesh also Pakistan.
Facebook said it had killed 65 Facebook accounts also 243 Instagram accounts for violating their guidelines on foreign interference. Ben Nimo, Facebook's head of Threat Intelligence, described the campaign as a "disinformation wash" that places content on multiple online forums and extends it to other platforms.
According to a Facebook report, the link was shared by a handful of influential people on Instagram who used the same hashtag, suggesting that the AstraZeneca vaccine was derived from a chimpanzee adenovirus.
Both campaign waves were unsuccessful and did not gain much strength, despite the various methods used.
"In addition to previous attempts to recruit influential people on social media, this operation appears to have used several tactics to spread misleading stories online about a western-made Covid vaccine," said Jack Stubbs, an investigator at social media analytics firm Grapha."There have been hacks and leaks, use of pay-per-view pseudo-news sites and networks of fake personalities on Facebook and Instagram."