Meta’s Security Team Says The US Military Is Involved In A Pro-Western Influence Operation

It may have taken Meta a while to finally say it but they are doing it now. The company’s security team has gone on to confirm how members of the US military are in fact involved in some sort of pro-western influence operation.

Meta revealed yesterday that its security team has removed nearly 39 different accounts from the Facebook app and then also deleted 16 pages on Facebook and around 26 different Instagram accounts. These had people trying to pose as if they were locals but in all reality, it was far from that.

Some networks had origins in places other than America like Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, Yemen, Tajikistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, and even Algeria.

Hence, accounts that were posted in various languages around a number of different nations as a part of this influence operation means it had to praise all sorts of anti-terrorist efforts seen in the military of the country while criticizing regimes in both Russia and China.

Meta is now referring to this particular campaign as one that’s inauthentic and so many efforts are being done to alter public debate for both strategic goals where fake accounts are the center of attention.

Today, researchers claim that so many fake accounts are present that have links to various individuals working with military sources in the US. These are posing as locals in nations where they’re getting targeted.

Most of the posts made were in Arabic, Russian, and even Farsi. They had to do with news and some were linked to current events. Then there was a lot of concern about terrorism arising and special praise was put on the ongoing pandemic and other types of content that had to be deleted due to it violating the policy for misinformation.

We saw the operation go on and share posts that criticized Iran, Russia, and even China and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine too.

For now, Meta is keeping its lips sealed in regard to which people of the US military are involved in this sort of operation. But we know for sure it is this same campaign that was first outlined in August of this year.

This particular operation was seen getting plenty of criticism and not a whole lot of engagement with Meta not disagreeing. In this particular report, it was mentioned how most of the posts outlined came with zero to little engagement, even with its own authentic communities involved.

Then we had Meta mention how so many individuals were present behind this particular network and it was working with people hiding their identities. For instance, you could well see how some accounts had profile pictures produced through the likes of machine learning.

A lot of the hidden disguise or concealment techniques failed to work because we had Meta mention that the timings during which posts were generated were based on the US and less on the working hours of the local or native nations.

Read next: Meta Launches Its Latest AI Technology Cicero That Challenges Humans In Diplomacy
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World