Facebook, Twitter dismantle a U.S. influence campaign about Ukraine

The covert influence campaigns are being taken down at a time when social media giants have been trying to crack down on disinformation campaigns about the war in Ukraine. But much of that work has been focused on fighting efforts by Russian authorities to promote propaganda about the war, including false claims about Ukrainian military aggression in the region or blaming Western nations’ complicity in the war.

This particularly crackdown by the social media giants is notable because one of the campaigns was linked to a U.S. government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, the report said.

Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, confirmed in a statement that the company and Twitter recently removed a network of accounts that originated in the United States for violating the platforms’ rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Franklin said it’s the first time the company has removed a foreign-focused influence network based in the United States. A Twitter spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The network of accounts shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military to criticize the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. The campaigns promoted the narrative that Russia was responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities just so it could pursue its "imperial ambitions,” the report said.

The covert campaigns often mimicked the strategies deployed by other countries such as Russia when seeking to influence the public perception of world events in other countries. For instance, accounts identified by Twitter and Facebook created fake personas with digitally-created photos, posed as independent media outlets and attempted to start hashtag campaigns, the report said.

In the wake of the war, social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube banned or throttled Russian state media accounts, restricted advertising and bolstered their fact-checking operations during the war. Traffic to Russian government-backed media channels on social media spiked in the early days of the invasion and then plummeted as the companies cracked down, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Since then, Ukrainian officials have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech but many of the companies have failed to keep up, according to a recent report

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.