Facebook stops Russian fake news campaign against Corona vaccinations
Facebook says it has stopped a global campaign to spread misinformation about Corona vaccines. According to the report, the U.S. company deleted 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts from Russia in July that had been used in an attempt to discredit Corona vaccines.
Facebook had been able to link the accounts to Fazze, a subsidiary of a UK-registered marketing company whose activities were mainly run from Russia.
"This (Fazze) campaign functioned like a disinformation laundromat," Facebook's transparency report states. "It created misleading articles and petitions on various forums such as Reddit, Medium, Change.org and Medapply." The content was then shared via fake accounts on social media - including Facebook and Instagram - to spread and amplify it, it said.
"Crude spamming tactics" were also used, it added. "However, the crux of the campaign appeared to be to get influencers with pre-existing audiences on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to post content and use certain hashtags without disclosing the origin of the posts." (SDA)
