A Russian organization linked to the Kremlin's covert influence campaigns ran more than 8,000 political ads on facebook despite European and U.S. restrictions prohibiting companies from doing business with the organization, according to three organizations that track online disinformation.
The Russian group, Social Design Agency, evaded facebook's lax enforcement and placed ads worth an estimated $338,000 targeting European users over a 15-month period ending in October, despite the platform itself highlighting the threat. the three organizations said. in a report released on Friday.
The Social Design Agency faces punitive sanctions in the European Union from 2023 and in the United States from April for spreading propaganda and disinformation to unsuspecting users on social media. Advertising campaigns on facebook raise “critical questions about the platform's compliance” with US and European laws, according to the report.
The report follows facebook parent company Meta's announcement that it was changing its rules for the content it allows on its social media platforms, including removing fact checks that flagged or deleted posts. The changes will almost certainly intensify Meta's confrontation with regulators in Europe over how it handles disinformation and other corrosive content.
The changes include lifting automatic restrictions on race- and gender-related content that could conflict with the European Union's Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to restrict illegal and harmful online activities and dissemination of disinformation. The 27-nation bloc announced last year that it had launched an investigation into Meta over poor oversight of misleading ads on facebook and instagram.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced content policies last week, he appeared to allude to the company's regulatory fight with the European Union, appealing to President-elect Donald J. Trump to “reject foreign governments” that According to him, they were seeking to restrict freedom of expression.
The Social Design Agency is a Moscow-based public relations firm that American and European officials say runs a sophisticated influence operation known as double.
Since 2022, Doppelgänger has created cartoon memes and online clones of real news sites, such as Le Monde and The Washington Post, to spread propaganda and disinformation, often about the war in Ukraine.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report, but pointed to the company's own public warnings about Doppelgänger.
Meta first identified the campaign in a threat analysis published in 2022, linking it to the Social Design Agency. It repeatedly blocked their operations when it found them, prompting campaign organizers to change tactics to avoid detection.
in another threat analysis In December, Meta said that “we no longer see Doppelgänger attempting to direct people in our apps to their domains that mimic websites of news media or government entities.”
Meta's analysis noted that the campaigns appeared to have little impact, but the Russian group continued its efforts on other social media sites, including Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr and Medium.
The organizations that documented the campaign (Check First, a Finnish research company, along with Reset.tech in London and ai Forensics in Paris) focused on efforts to influence facebook users in France, Germany, Poland and Italy. Doppelgänger has also been linked to influence operations in the United States, Israel and other countries, but that is not included in the report's conclusions.
The investigation was based on thousands of internal documents of the Social Design Agency obtained by two European news organizations: Delfi Estonia and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The Social Design Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The documents included screenshots of the group's interactions with Meta's Ad Manager, the platform for businesses to place and track ads on facebook, using inauthentic usernames. The documents allowed researchers to reconstruct the scale and cost of Russian information operations in greater detail than usual.
Researchers estimated that the ads generated more than 123,000 clicks from users and earned Meta at least $338,000 in the European Union alone. Investigators acknowledged that the figures provide only an incomplete example of the Russian agency's efforts.
In addition to broadcasting Russia's views on Ukraine, the agency ran ads in response to major news events, including the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and a terrorist attack in a Moscow suburb last March that killed 145. people. The announcements often appeared within 48 hours, attempting to shape public perception of events.
After the October 7 attacks, ads promoted false claims that Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas. The ads reached more than 237,000 accounts in two to three days, “underscoring the operation's ability to weaponize current events in support of geopolitical narratives,” according to the researcher's report.
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU disinformation laboratorya Brussels-based nonprofit research organization, said the report highlights the need for Meta to do more, not less, to combat disinformation, and for EU regulators to hold the company accountable.
“If Europe wants to be a sovereign entity with its own laws, those laws must be enforced by platforms and other actors,” he said. “Failure to properly enforce them raises serious concerns about sovereignty and whether Europe can ensure that its laws are respected on its own territory.”
