Today Facebook removed dozens of Facebook Pages that my Stanford Internet Observatory team has spent the past few weeks analyzing. The Pages are attributed to entities linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, and targeted 6 African countries. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/prigoz…
While many of Prigozhin’s activities in Africa are known, we provide evidence that he is engaged in social media activities in several African countries to a much wider extent than we have previously known.
Libya: This operation - the one operation we attribute to Wagner Group - supported 2 potential future political competitors. It had Egyptian Page managers. The most interesting Pages included Gaddafi nostalgia content, like this Page. These Pages bolstered Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. 
Sudan: 22 Pages we reviewed focused on Sudan. These were in both Arabic & English, & affiliated with 2 news websites, khartoumstar.com and sudandaily.org, that were created at the same time as the Facebook content. They appear to have employed Sudanese reporters.
CAR: The CAR content was a vigorously hyper-partisan set of Pages, and 7 out of the 13 CAR Pages were "news" Pages.
Madagascar: this was a mix of content related to news and politicians, but interestingly also included a Page related to a mining corporation; Russia has mining and extraction interests throughout Africa.
Mozambique: These Pages began just last month. The content, strongly in favor of the ruling party that won elections this month, involved an actual fake news story aimed at slandering the opposition.
DRC: The DRC content was the most scattered. The pages were very partisan but there was no clear or consistent allegiance. This may be explained by political infighting.
Two addition points of note: 1) One of the Pages was facebook.com/africanists. 2) One of the CAR Pages shared this comically biased AFRIC survey: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
We’re grateful to @dossier_center for sharing a document with us and the Facebook Threat Intel team for their collaboration. Full white paper here: fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/29… I’m excited to see if country experts have additional thoughts on these Pages and posts.
