Meta: Russia has ramped up covert activities tied to Ukraine war

In its quarterly threat report, Meta has found that while Russia’s overt influence operations conducted by its state-controlled media has decreased on the platform, attempts at covert activities tied to the war in Ukraine have sharply increased over the last year. 

The tech giant said that Russia’s state-controlled media are now shifting to other platforms, like Telegram, to avoid additional transparency and demotions of their links to their websites.

“Although they are still active on our platforms, a number of Russian state-controlled media have shared posts urging followers to find them on other services instead,” the report said. 

Meta added that it has taken steps to take down overt operations run by state-controlled media including preventing the outlets “from running ads globally, demonetizing their pages and instagram accounts and demoting their content in people’s feeds.”

The company said that these measures were also taken globally and across all languages. 

Last year, Meta faced pushback from Democratic lawmakers who were concerned that the company was not doing enough to address Spanish-language disinformation.

The lawmakers said that Russian state-controlled media were making a “concentrated effort to target” Spanish-speaking communities and spread disinformation about the war in Ukraine. 

“Facebook has continuously failed to show it is adequately addressing this problem for Spanish-speaking communities, and the success of Russian-sponsored outlets in crowding out the information ecosystem for Spanish speakers serves as proof to this fact,” the lawmakers said in a letter addressed to Meta. 

A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the company was running its “entire strategy on misinformation in Spanish.” 

“We’re removing content related to the war in Ukraine that violates our policies, and working with third-party fact checkers to debunk false claims,” the spokesperson said. 

While attempts at covert activities have increased, those operations appear to be less sophisticated as the actors behind them have put in little effort and instead use “a large number of low-quality [fake] accounts all at once, in the hope that at least a few might survive and escape detection,” on the platform, the report said.