The Facebook group Meta has stopped the largest Russian campaign with false information in the war of aggression against Ukraine.
Fake articles were distributed via a network of hundreds of accounts claiming to come from the FAZ, Spiegel and the British newspaper The Guardian, among others.
It also warned of Ukrainian refugees, as Meta wrote in a report published on Tuesday.
It also claimed that sanctions against Russia would only harm the West itself.
The network included over 1,600 accounts and a good 700 pages on Facebook and around 30 profiles on the group's photo and video platform Instagram.
In addition to Germany, it also targeted users in France, Italy, the UK and Ukraine.
Only about 4,000 accounts followed one of the network's Facebook pages, while the operators spent around $105,000 (€110,000) on advertising.
In addition, some of the content was also distributed by Facebook profiles of Russian embassies.
While Meta considers it proven based on evaluated information that the campaign was operated from Russia, the group did not provide any further information on who exactly could be behind it there.
At the same time, Meta also blocked a Chinese account network that was trying to influence public opinion in the US with a view to the general elections in early November.
Meta emphasized that both campaigns were stopped early before they reached many users.
But the Chinese activities in particular were different from previous campaigns from the country, since this time it was specified that the accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter came from Americans.
They represented both conservative and liberal points of view.