Facebook to begin publishing a monthly report on coordinated inauthentic behavior, says it took down 467 Facebook accounts and 1,245 Instagram accounts in Feb.
The shift announced here is to cadence: a standing monthly report, starting with February's removal of 467 Facebook accounts and 1,245 Instagram accounts. It extends the transparency-reporting template Facebook began with its first content moderation report in Q1 2018, which covered fake accounts and hate speech at platform scale rather than per-operation.
First-order effects
Researchers, journalists, and regulators tracking influence operations move from waiting for ad-hoc announcements to a predictable monthly dataset covering both Facebook and Instagram.
Second-order effects
The split in February's numbers — more than twice as many Instagram accounts removed as Facebook accounts — puts Instagram's exposure to coordinated behavior on the record alongside the parent platform's, inviting scrutiny of enforcement parity across the two apps.
Third-order effects
If the monthly format holds, per-operation takedown announcements give way to standardized platform transparency reporting as the norm for influence-operation disclosure, raising the bar competitors would need to match.
The trend: Platform integrity disclosures are moving from episodic, operation-by-operation announcements toward scheduled, standardized transparency reporting.
JUST OUT: @Facebook monthly report on coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Two new takedowns: 1) From India, focused on Gulf geopolitics and football. @Graphika_NYC report to follow. 2) From Egypt, focused on regional geopolitics. @DFRLab reporting https://about.fb.com/...
Yesterday, @Facebook shut down a network of more than 1700 assets operating from Egypt, that targeted countries in the Middle East and North Africa. @DFRLab had a look at the network before it was removed. [THREAD] https://medium.com/...
Excellent thread from @benimmo digging further into FB takedowns and influence campaigns. So many - both foreign and domestic - use the appearance and style of local news, citizen journalism or other publishing ventures to boost deception and credibility https://twitter.com/...
Now that @facebook seems to be suspending disinfo networks fairly regularly now, it's worth noting that they were likely doing almost zero about this before 2016 when everyone finally noticed. Public pressure is the only way these platforms do anything. https://twitter.com/...
Meanwhile, lovely report from @DFRLab's @jean_leroux on the Egyptian takedown: this time, Egyptian commercial firms targeting Turkey and Qatar, inter alia. Come for the analysis, stay for the puns. https://medium.com/...
Final point: this operation didn't get much impact. Relatively few page views, and a handful of engagements at most on most of its posts. Effort doesn't always translate into effect. With info ops, it's always important not to overstate their effect.
So, putting it together, we have an operation run by a marketing firm in India, pretending to be based in various countries, but its connecting theme was hostility to Saudi and the UAE (also, to a lesser extent, Iran). It praised Qatar, especially as an international host. https:…
Facebook attributed this set to an Indian marketing firm, aRep Global. The open-source evidence pointed to India as the origin too. This was “True News Source”, allegedly based in Canada, but the FB page was managed from India and Nigeria. https://twitter.com/...
5. The audiences varied hugely, from 60 (Iran set) to 6 million (Egypt set, though note that this will include followers of legitimate assets too, since FB de-platformed two marketing companies for it.) IO come in all shapes and sizes. Don't assume they're big.
3. These were multi-platform operations, not just on Facebook and Instagram, but also Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Reddit, websites, blogs, and even LinkedIn. That's normal. Multi-platform info ops are the rule these days, not the exception. (And yes, @ManCity got mentions too.) htt…