Facebook suspends accounts linked to Putin ally for spreading disinformation in Africa

As reported by The New York Times, a Russian-linked Facebook campaign has been found testing new disinformation tactics targeting African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon, Sudan, and Libya. Yesterday, Facebook said in a post that it had removed three inauthentic Russian influence networks from the platform that were linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin a close ally to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

He was accused of running a global disinformation media empire and funding the Internet Research Agency, the troll factory that boosted .

According to Stanford Internet Observatory who worked with Facebook to take down the networks the campaign used a variety of new techniques such as targeting several countries through posts in Arabic.

Facebooks head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said the Russians had almost 200 fake accounts with more than 1 million followers attached in Africa. Also, it was reported that the Russians worked with local people in African countries to create fake Facebook accounts to evade detection.

A Facebook page, created by Russians in Sudan, was designed to depict a news site called Sudan Daily, it regularly shared articles from Sputnik, Russias state-owned news organization.

As the study pointed out, Facebooks influence in political opinion isnt just a case of micro-targeted ads, it lies deeper in its structural issues that allow perpetrators to easily spread false information and researchers believe Facebook isnt doing enough about it.