San Francisco (AFP)
Facebook said on Friday it had ended two separate public manipulation operations, including a network piloted in Vietnam and the United States that targeted Americans with messages in favor of Donald Trump.
These pages, groups and profiles mainly shared content from the media group Epoch Times (linked to the spiritual movement Falun Gong, banned in China) and BL, an American media favorable to the American president.
The people involved in this campaign "largely used fake profiles - many of which were automatically blocked by our systems - to manage their pages and groups, post automatically at very high frequency and redirect users to other sites" , detailed Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity at Facebook.
The platform also noticed that some profiles posted photos generated by artificial intelligence technologies, to pretend to be Americans.
They shared texts, images and montages on subjects of American politics, from the dismissal procedure launched against Donald Trump in the elections, through religion, trade and family values.
The other operation dismantled by Facebook was carried out from Georgia and targeted residents of this Caucasian country, shaken in recent weeks by a deep political crisis.
In October, the social network announced that it had blocked four operations of manipulation of opinion, carried out by groups which pretended to be users and were supported by Iran and Russia, as well as a operation of disinformation carried out from Russia to several African countries.
As the 2020 presidential election in the United States approaches, Facebook is stepping up its efforts to combat attempted manipulation on its various platforms.
The Californian group had been strongly criticized for not blocking major disinformation campaigns during elections in 2016, including the American presidential election.
© 2019 AFP