Facebook, Twitter and Others Remove Pro-U.S. Influence Campaign

Twitter said it had no comment on the Stanford and Graphika report. Meta did not respond to requests for comment. While the companies have regularly revealed influence operations they remove from their platforms, they have not published a report on the pro-U.S. campaign.

The only U.S. operations that Meta has previously named were domestic efforts, such as when the company revealed in October 2020 that a marketing firm, Rally Forge, was working with the conservative organization Turning Point USA to target Americans.

In an email, YouTube said it had terminated several channels posting in Arabic, Farsi and Russian to promote U.S. foreign affairs, including channels linked to a U.S. consulting firm, as part of an investigation into coordinated influence operations. It said its findings were similar to those in the Stanford and Graphika report.

Ms. DiResta said the tactics used in the pro-U.S. influence campaign resembled those used by China. While Russia often seeks to sow divisions in its online campaigns, China is more focused on promoting a rosy picture of life in the country, she said. With the pro-U.S. campaign, the goal was also “to show how awesome the U.S. was in comparison to the other countries,” she said.

The researchers were notified of the pro-U.S. online campaign by Meta and Twitter so they could analyze and study the activity, according to the report. The researchers found that the operation largely focused on messaging that favored the United States and the West through memes and false news stories, while criticizing Russia, China and Iran.

The accounts tailored their language and messaging to different regions, the researchers said. In one effort, a group of 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook profiles and 10 Instagram accounts were created between June 2020 and March 2022 to focus on Central Asia. Some pretended to be media outlets with names like Vostochnaya Pravda. At least one account posed as an individual using a doctored profile photo based on an image of the Puerto Rican actress Valeria Menendez.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/technology/facebook-twitter-influence-campaign.html