Russia continues to be the top creator of disinformation on social media, with the country hosting the most fraudulent and misleading Facebook accounts, according to a new report.
A report from Facebook reveals the social media company has discovered misinformation efforts in more than 50 countries since 2017 - with Russia being the biggest source of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" with 27 bogus networks identified.
Between 2017 and the end of 2020, Facebook says it took down 150 networks of fake accounts - many of them foreign disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing Americans and others founded in the U.S. by local extremists. Facebook says it has 2.85 billion users around the world.
"These campaigns attempt to undermine trust in civic institutions and corrupt public debate by exploiting the same digital tools that have diversified the online public square and empowered critical discussions from Me Too to the Black Lives Matter movements," Facebook said.
Facebook's cybersecurity policy director Nathaniel Gleicher believed the business had come a long way since Russian intelligence was able to carry out a large operation in 2016 using false accounts in an attempt to sway the presidential election.
It is followed by Myanmar and the U.S. with nine and Ukraine with eight networks.
In response Russian players in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook implemented a policy to coordinate inauthentic activity. Since then, Facebook has been investigating and disrupting operations all over the world, according to the company.
Facebook has a team dedicated to uncovering and disrupting sophisticated influence operations, as well as using the information gained from these investigations to better our automated detection and enforcement at scale.
Experts in open-source research, cybersecurity, threat investigations, law enforcement, national security, investigative journalism, engineering, data science and academic studies in disinformation make up the team - which now includes more than 200 people.
