Facebook dismantled a Russian disinformation operation that sought to discredit AstraZeneca and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines against Covid-19, including by seeking to make it appear that the former
"turned people vaccinated into chimpanzees."
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“Disinformation is not always subtle,”
noted ironically Ben Nimmo, director of one of Facebook's cybersecurity services, at a press conference on Tuesday. The Californian group is regularly accused of contributing to the massive dissemination of disinformation. Last month, US President Joe Biden even estimated that Facebook and other platforms
were "killing"
people by letting fake news about the Covid vaccination circulate.
"This campaign worked like a laundromat
,
"
said the social media giant.
A British communications firm, Fazze, was responsible for disseminating misleading articles and petitions as widely as possible on various forums and networks (including Reddit, Medium, Change.org, Facebook, Instagram ...), via fake profiles but also influencers.
Offers to disparage the vaccine
This is what precipitated the detection of this operation: in May, several French and German influencers, active in the field of health and sciences, denounced offers they had received to denigrate the Pfizer vaccine against payment.
"Incredible. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus. They never had premises there, it is an aesthetic laser center! All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles ... which have been missing since this morning. Everyone has worked in Russia before ”
, had told on Twitter Léo Grasset, popularizer of science with 1.17 million subscribers to his Youtube channel. In the end, most of the content posted on Instagram - mainly targeting India and Latin America - does notreceived
"no likes"
, Facebook said.
“It fell flat,”
said Ben Nimmo.
The Fazze agency is now banned from the platform.
“It was a botched campaign, but the process was sophisticated,”
said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's director of security regulations.
“There was spam, influencers, document piracy.
(...) So it's more difficult for a single platform to understand this kind of campaign in its entirety, ”
he added, calling on all civil society (academics, journalists, authorities) to mobilize in side of the networks on the front line.
Facebook has been promoting its efforts against disinformation for years. On July 19, Joe Biden returned to his very strong words to clarify:
"Facebook does not kill people,"
he said, denouncing false information disseminated by users which can
"harm those who listen to them. "
and
" killing people "
.
