Menlo Park, California-based Meta has routinely shut down such networks since Russian trolls used Facebook to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.
Photo Credit: noah berger/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Sept. 27, 2022 2:24 p.m. ET
Meta META -1.44% Platforms Inc. announced on Tuesday that it has removed separate networks in China and Russia that have been running covert influence campaigns related to US politics and the war in Ukraine.
In a post on its blog, Facebook’s parent company said it had a small network that originated in China and operated across multiple social media platforms, targeting US voters on both sides of the political spectrum ahead of the 2022 midterm elections .
The network also fuels anti-government sentiments related to the Czech Republic’s foreign policy towards China and Ukraine, Meta said.
The company said it removed a large network that originated in Russia and operated through a sprawling network of more than 60 websites designed to look like legitimate European news organizations.
The network targeted Germany, as well as France, Italy, Ukraine and the UK with narratives supporting Russia in the conflict with Ukraine and criticizing Ukrainian refugees, Meta said.
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Meta called it the “largest and most complex operation of Russian origin that we have disrupted in Ukraine since the beginning of the war.”
Since discovering that Russian trolls were using Facebook to interfere in the 2016 US election, Meta has regularly reported removing these types of networks from its social media services. The company frequently announces the most notable of its coordinated takedowns of inauthentic networks, and releases a quarterly report summarizing various network removals from its services.
—Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this article.
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