Several French influencers have allowed Facebook to dismantle a large Russian disinformation operation.
This aimed to discredit the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines against Covid-19, including by seeking to make believe that the first "transformed people vaccinated into chimpanzees".
"Disinformation is not always subtle," noted ironically Ben Nimmo, director of one of Facebook's cybersecurity services, at a press conference on Tuesday, August 10.
The Californian group is regularly accused of contributing to the massive dissemination of disinformation.
Last month, US President Joe Biden even estimated that Facebook and other platforms were "killing" people by letting fake news about the Covid-19 vaccination circulate.
A ghost communication agency
“This campaign worked like a laundromat,” the social media giant revealed.
A British communications firm, Fazze, was responsible for disseminating misleading articles and petitions as widely as possible on various forums and networks (including Reddit, Medium, Change.org, Facebook, Instagram ...), via fake profiles but also influencers.
In May, several French and German influencers, active in the field of health and science, denounced offers they had received to denigrate the Pfizer vaccine against payment.
This is what precipitated the detection of this operation.
"Unbelievable. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus. They never had a facility there, it's an aesthetic laser center! All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles ... who have been disappearing since this morning. Everyone has worked in Russia before, "Léo Grasset, a science popularizer with 1.17 million subscribers to his Youtube channel, told Twitter on Twitter.
A "fallen flat" disinformation campaign
In the end, most of the content posted on Instagram - mainly targeting India and Latin America - received "no likes," Facebook said.
"It fell flat," said Ben Nimmo.
The Fazze agency is now banned from the platform.
"It was a botched campaign, but the process was sophisticated," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's director of security regulations.
"There was spam, influencers, document piracy. (...) So it's more difficult for a single platform to understand this kind of campaign in its entirety", he added, calling all civil society (academics, journalists, authorities) to mobilize alongside the networks on the front line.
With AFP
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