According to a report released on Thursday by Facebook-owned Meta (FB.O), the social media company has removed hacking campaigns, influence networks, and scam operations in the midst of the Ukrainian conflict. It also said it was reviewing additional steps to address misinformation from Russian government pages.
On a conference call with reporters, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said, “We’re constantly reviewing our policies based on the evolving situation on the ground, and we’re actively now reviewing additional steps to address misinformation and hoaxes coming from Russian government pages.”
Following its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, which Moscow describes as a “special military operation,” Russia has challenged huge tech companies to control internet information flows. Facebook and Instagram have been blocked, and Twitter (TWTR.N) has had its service slowed. This week, Twitter said that it will no longer amplify or encourage Russian government accounts to its users. find out more
Meta said government-connected entities from Russia and Belarus have engaged in cyber espionage and covert internet influence operations, including one related to the Belarusian KGB, in its first quarterly adversary threat assessment.
It claimed there had been further attempts from networks it had previously destroyed, including new attempts by the threat actor Ghostwriter to access the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel.
According to the study, Meta also eliminated a network of roughly 200 Russian accounts that collaborated to falsely report people, primarily in Ukraine and Russia, for breaches such as hate speech and bullying.
When Meta took it down in March, the mass reporting was mostly coordinated in a cooking-themed Facebook Group with roughly 50 members.
Meta claimed it had also taken down tens of thousands of accounts, pages, and groups that were attempting to profit from the conflict in Ukraine by pushing users to ad-filled websites or selling them items. It said that spammers all across the world have pretended to be sharing live updates from the Ukraine situation by broadcasting live gaming videos or reposting popular content, including other people’s footage from the country.
Other takedowns included the dismantling of two cyberespionage operations from Iran, an influence campaign in Brazil that posed as environmental activists defending Amazon deforestation, and a network in the Philippines that claimed responsibility for bringing down and defacing news websites.