Meta details influence operations from Russia, impersonating news websites to spread anti-Ukraine content in Europe, and China, targeting the US and Czechia
Russia set up a sprawling and sophisticated network of websites impersonating mainstream media outlets, which it used …
ProtocolIssie Lapowsky
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta’s disclosure extends a documented pattern of Russia-linked activity aimed at Ukraine-related audiences: earlier in 2022, Meta disrupted Belarus- and Russia-linked efforts to compromise Ukrainian military accounts. The newer reporting shifts attention from account-level tactics to sites designed to borrow the credibility of established news brands.
The infrastructure angle also has a longer lineage. Researchers previously connected politically opposed EU-focused sites and social accounts to infrastructure used in Russia’s 2016 interference, while later reporting describes Russian propaganda spread through hijacked influential Bluesky accounts.
First-order effects
European news outlets whose identities were mimicked face an immediate brand-trust problem, as anti-Ukraine material can appear to originate from recognizable publishers.
US and Czech information audiences are identified as targets of a separate China-linked operation, widening the set of national audiences covered by Meta’s public attribution.
Second-order effects
Meta, publishers, and other platforms must treat coordinated influence activity as a mix of social accounts and external web infrastructure, not solely as in-platform fake profiles.
News organizations have a stronger incentive to monitor lookalike domains and coordinate takedown evidence with platforms when impersonation is used to distribute political content.
Third-order effects
If campaigns continue to combine impersonated outlets, social distribution, and compromised accounts, influence-defense work will increasingly depend on cross-platform attribution rather than isolated content moderation.
The pattern points to credibility itself becoming a contested distribution asset: operators seek established news identities and influential accounts instead of building audiences from scratch.
The trend: State-linked influence operations are diversifying from fake social personas toward reusable trust infrastructure, including news-brand impersonation and account hijacking.
@facebook @Meta .@Meta concluded the network originated from #Russia. @DFRLab noticed several indicators of previous Russian influence ops including the amplification of pro-Kremlin narratives, paid promotion, inaccurate and non-native grammar; impersonating real people/instituti…
After @DFRLab discovered a small inauthentic network on @Facebook promoting posts critical of Western sanctions against #Russia, an independent @Meta investigation revealed a larger network of 2300+ assets promoting Kremlin interests across Europe. 🧵⬇️ https://medium.com/...
#DOPPELGANGER: How Russia-based actors cloned legitimate media outlets from multiple countries (🇩🇪🇬🇧 🇫🇷🇮🇹 🇱🇻🇺🇦) to spread disinformation designed to undermine the support for Ukraine. Our last investigation: https://www.doppelganger.ltd/
“The Chinese-origin influence operation ran across multiple social media platforms, and was the first one to target US domestic politics ahead of the 2022 midterms” https://twitter.com/...
“This is the largest and most complex Russian-origin operation that we've disrupted since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.” https://twitter.com/...
I wouldn't be able to tell these are from state-run influence campaigns tbh. Seems like the kind of replies you'd come across on Twitter regularly from Meta's CIB Report: https://about.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
[Me, a tech reporter]: Chinese misinfo networks on FB? Bad! Awful! [Me, also a union steward]: substantial lunch breaks? 9-5 and weekends off? Good for these work/life balance icons https://about.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Meta takes down a large Russian disinformation network of 60 websites “impersonating legitimate websites of news organizations in Europe, including Spiegel, The Guardian and Bild.” https://about.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@Meta The operations were very different, but both worked on multiple social media platforms and petitions sites. The Russian op was even on LiveJournal (cute). List of domains, petitions etc in the report. #OSINT community, happy hunting!
@Meta China: this was the first Chinese network we've disrupted that focused on US domestic politics ahead of the midterms and Czech foreign policy toward China and Ukraine. It was small, we took it down before it built an audience, but that's a new direction for Chinese IO.
NEW: Meta shutting down accounts from Russia and China. — Chinese accounts targeting US. Tiny number and had no impact but Metasays it's flagging because it's on “high alert” ahead of midterms. — Russian accounts part of sophisticated network. https://www.cnn.com/...
Important to note: Meta not attributing either campaign to specific entities within China or Russia, or to the Chinese and Russian governments, instead saying only the accounts that were part of the campaigns were run out of the respective countries.
🚨BREAKING🚨 @Meta took down two covert influence ops: Big one from Russia🇷🇺 targeting Europe with spoofed media websites like the Guardian and Spiegel First one from China 🇨🇳 to focus on both sides of domestic US 🇺🇸 politics and Czech-China relations. https://about.fb.com/...