Meta Shuts Down Russian Influence Operation on Facebook, Instagram | #datingscams | #russianliovescams | #lovescams

Meta on Sunday shut down a network of websites posing as independent news agencies or fake personas, and targeting Ukrainians on Facebook and Instagram. It also warned of a “threat actor” known as Ghostwriter that takes over social media accounts via email phishing scams.

“We took down this operation, blocked their domains from being shared on our platform, and shared information with other tech platforms, researchers and governments,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy, and David Agranovich, Director of Threat Disruption, wrote in a blog post(Opens in a new window).

The misinformation campaign, Meta said(Opens in a new window), violates its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. It consisted of about 40 fake accounts, pages, and groups. Fictitious characters were also active on YouTube, Twitter, Telegram, and Russian social media sites Odnoklassniki and VK “to appear more authentic in an apparent attempt to withstand scrutiny by platforms and researchers,” Gleicher and Agranovich said.

“This operation ran a handful of websites masquerading as independent news outlets, publishing claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine being a failed state,” they said.

Operators would write and post articles onto their website “as if they were a reporter or commentator,” Agranovich told CBS News(Opens in a new window). “The accounts were really just designed to post links to their own websites and direct people off platform.” Before being dismantled, the network’s posts received a “very low level” of shares, comments, and reactions.

Meanwhile, the social network is “recommending that people in Ukraine and Russia take steps to strengthen the security of their online accounts to protect themselves from being targeted by threat actors” like Ghostwriter, which “typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts and post disinformation as if it’s coming from the legitimate account owners.”

To help thwart these takeovers, Meta rolled out a few security features for those in Ukraine, including one-step Facebook account locks, removing the ability to view and search the friends lists of Facebook accounts; and security notifications on Instagram.

On Sunday, Facebook also restricted access to several accounts—including those belonging to Russian state media organizations. Russia’s government last week revealed vague plans to “partially restrict access” to Facebook as well as restricting access to Twitter.