Fake news: they dismantle a network that operated against Pfizer and AstraZeneca

At the end of 2020, as the national government carried out testing and negotiations to approve the vaccine of AstraZeneca, an influence campaign – from abroad – via social networks had among its targets the Argentina, in an attempt to disparage the immunization developed by the University of Oxford.

This was the first wave of an international operation initiated by a UK registered marketing company which was managed from another country, which operated on more than ten online platforms and which went through a second phase five months later that aimed at the Pfizer.

Argentinian Facebook and Instagram users were among the objectives of this operation. disinformation, which was also directed against inhabitants of India, other Latin American countries and, to a lesser extent, the United States, according to an investigation revealed on Tuesday by the company Facebook itself during a press conference.

Social network researchers have found links between this operation and Fazzé, a UK-registered marketing company “whose operations were mostly run from Russia,” according to the social network report.

“We don’t have the detailed country-by-country (campaign) reach. However, beyond borders, the reach was low,” he said. Nathaniel likes, Head of Security Policy at Facebook.

No paid advertisements aimed at Argentine users were found as part of the campaign, according to a request from the agency. David Agranovitch, director of Threat Interruption of the social network.

In other words, the operation failed to develop a significant audience, even though it showed how some broadcast campaigns fake news and deliberately misinform via the Internet.

In its various phases, the operation combined the publication of memes with hashtags such as #AstraZenecamiente and phrases that claimed, for example, that “the vaccine was based on a chimpanzee gene from the company AstraZeneca“.

“This campaign served as a disinformation machine,” said the survey, and specifies that its promoters “have created deceptive articles and petitions in various forums such as Reddit, Way, Changer.org Yes Medapply.co.uk.“

Then they used fake accounts on social networks like Facebook and Instagram to sow and amplify this content from outside the platform, using crude spam tactics, ”he continues.

This type of campaign – which is being developed simultaneously on several platforms – makes, according to Same, that for each company or social network, it is a real challenge to see the whole and to carry out common actions, even if their authors “leave traces through the Internet and expose themselves”.

In any case, the center of this operation was to contact influencers “with audiences already developed on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to publish content and use specific hashtags without revealing the origin of the posts”, describes the book.

In fact, it was influencers who made this activity known in France and Germany, and they played a key role in exposing the first clue and thus allowing to discover the full extent of the disinformation network.

The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg As a result of this investigation, he deleted a total of 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts, which had approximately 24,000 followers.