Russian propagandists are still targeting Americans in influence operations, Meta says
Meta released its quarterly threat report which detailed six coordinated campaigns that were seemingly designed to influence perceptions around the globe.
Pro-Russian propagandists are still working to influence Americans ahead of the 2024 presidential elections, Meta announced Thursday, though it isn’t clear what effect they’re having.
In the company’s latest quarterly Adversarial Threat Report, the final report of its type before November’s election, Meta said that it had dismantled five distinct Russian propaganda campaigns in the last three months. It detailed influence campaigns from groups based in the U.S. and Vietnam, without going into detail about who may be funding those operations.
Three of the five campaigns at least partially targeted Americans or English speakers, Meta said, and each of those three was centered around criticizing Ukraine and any support for its defense against Russia, which invaded it in 2022. Some of the campaigns Meta detailed also targeted Ukrainian and French speakers. Meta did not directly tie the operations to the Russian government, but said one of them is an ongoing campaign that the U.S. had previously sanctioned, saying it takes orders from the Kremlin.
One of the campaigns, which targeted English and French-speaking audiences, relied heavily on generative artificial intelligence to write fake news articles, Meta said. Most articles were innocuous, but some occasionally veered into sharp criticism of Democrats for funding aid to Ukraine instead of domestic priorities.
A second campaign centered around social media accounts tied to a seemingly fake think tank that warned about Ukrainian migrants and claimed Ukraine’s government had failed to protect its people. It spent around $41,000 in ad money and its pages had around 23,000 followers, making it one of the larger operations.
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