Thread by @benimmo

BREAKING: Facebook just took down 364 pages and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behaviour in the former USSR.

Who was running them?

Sputnik employees, that's who.

newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/01/r…

The great @nikaaleksejeva found the first part of this network in Latvia. @DFRLab has been looking at the whole network since then.

Top takeaways here: medium.com/dfrlab/faceboo…

The network was cross-border, large-scale, and amplified Rossiya Segodnya content - mostly Sputnik, but also the TOK video service.

Fake amplification, on an industrial scale.

Detailed analysis here: medium.com/dfrlab/faceboo…

The pages posed as all kinds of interest groups, from foodies to presidential fans.

But they systematically promoted Sputnik content (and sometimes TOK), and cross-posted their videos.

Cross-posting is only possible if the source allows it...

Facebook traced these pages to Sputnik employees. The open-source evidence pointed in that direction too.

Look at this page. Uzbekistan presidential fan page, managed from Russia.

Here's a page about fashion in Georgia, paying to promote a Sputnik article.

Another Georgian page, about the weather in Abkhazia.

This one exclusively shared Sputnik content. No other sources at all in December.

This page, focused on Uzbekistan, was a bit more subtle.

It shared Sputnik stories via Google shortener, and added memes.

But all it shared was Sputnik.

This one, in Estonia, interspersed Sputnik posts with other news sources. But look at the pattern of video sharing.

Sputnik was the main beneficiary, but TOK, which is also part of the Rossiya Segodnya portfolio, was amplified too.

Some of the pages were upfront about their Sputnik connections. This one referenced "my dear colleagues at Sputnik Kazakhstan."

In Latvia, after @nikaaleksejeva uncovered this network, @lsmlv asked the head of Sputnik Latvia about the pages, and he confirmed the connection to the Latvia-focused ones.

This page, focused on Kazakhstan, gave Sputnik as its URL.

A lot of the posts were apolitical, and appropriate to the themes the pages claimed.

This looked like audience-building, not direct political interference.

There was political content, though, especially in the Baltics, and focused on minority issues and NATO.

Some of the personal accounts looked pretty fake, too. This one managed a cluster of pages in Georgia. Note the profile pics.

All those pics came from elsewhere online: a Russian Google+ profile, a French hairdressing site, and a Swedish Instagram model.

Its Christmas picture was taken from blogger @Hayley_Larue, of blondieinthecity.com.

Based on its own investigations, Facebook concluded: "Despite their misrepresentations of their identities, we found that these Pages and accounts were linked to employees of Sputnik."

The open-source evidence points the same way. /

Thread ends.