Facebook has suspended over 150 covert operations in the past four years from over 50 nations, including India, in violation of its policies.
The covert influence operations (IO) were carried out from 2017 to mid-2021 and aimed at both domestic and international public debate.
In February 2020, Facebook removed a network operated by Indian digital marketing company aRep Global.
It focused on a wide range of topics: from politics in the Gulf region to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
“This operation tried to get people impersonating news outlets on their websites and relied on nearly a dozen platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Medium,” Facebook said.
Domestic I / O continues to push the boundaries of acceptable online behavior around the world.
“About half of the influence operations we’ve removed since 2017 – including in Moldova, Honduras, Romania, the UK, the US, Brazil, and India – were conducted by locals who were familiar with domestic issues and audiences,” Facebook said in one new report on coordinated spurious behavior (CIB).
These were political campaigns, parties, and private companies that used misleading tactics in pursuit of their goals.
In 2020, Facebook began reporting on its broader enforcement against deceptive tactics that do not reach the CIB level in an effort to further improve the public’s understanding of these often financially motivated behaviors.
In response to this growing threat, a community of defense lawyers that includes social media platforms, civil society lawyers, open source researchers, law enforcement, and the media have deployed teams to detect and eliminate IO.
“As part of this effort, our Facebook teams have developed our own blended enforcement strategy to not only detect and stop certain influence operations, but also to uncover the tactics behind them and make them less effective,” the company said.
Live television
#mute
