Facebook Detects Covid-19 Vaccine Disinformation Campaign That Has Recruited “Influencers” | They deleted around 300 accounts

The company Facebook detected and deleted some 300 accounts from his eponymous social network and from Instagram linked to a marketing firm that was used to launch a disinformation campaign on vaccines against coronavirus and recruit ‘influencers‘to share their content on social networks.

Latest report on Mark Zuckerberg’s coordinated inauthentic company behavior includes analysis of disinformation campaign deployed from Russia and linked to UK marketing firm Fazze, which he directed his attacks on the public in Latin America, India and the United States.

This campaign was developed in two phases. The first, between November and December 2020, in which posts and comments were promoted against the vaccine of AstraZeneca for covid-19, in which He claimed he would turn people into chimpanzees. The second, in May this year, questioned the safety of the vaccine Pfizer.

This disinformation campaign worked with the support of “influencers”, whom they recruited to share their posts on social networks like Facebook and Instagram, but also on TikTok and YouTube, where they already had an audience.

In general, and according to the report from the virtual platform, the publications of these “influencers” have had little impact on their followers. Only paid content has managed to gain attention.

The company underlined the difficulty of identifying this campaign, which carried out its operations on several Internet services simultaneously. Once detected, the company deleted 65 accounts from Facebook and 243 from Instagram, and banned Fazze from their platforms.

This case is an example of the coordinated inauthentic behaviors that the social network detects and fights. The July report includes the deletion of 144 Facebook accounts and 262 Instagram accounts, as well as 13 pages and eight groups, from two networks located in Burma and Russia.