On Thursday, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc said that it had removed a network in Russia for allegedly abusing its tools to report and suspend accounts in Ukraine and in Russia over possible policy violations on the platform.
According to the reports, Meta claimed that a Belarus-based group attempted to compromise the Facebook accounts of Ukrainian military personnel. Meta said that they have also removed hacking campaigns, influence networks and scam operations amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine and added that it was reviewing additional steps to address misinformation from Russian government pages.
A group of hackers purportedly having links with the Belarusian government broke into the Facebook accounts of Ukrainian military officials and posted videos calling on the Ukrainian army to surrender. Meta said the posts appeared as if they were coming from legitimate account owners.
The hacking campaign was unleashed by a person known as “Ghostwriter,” said Meta in its release.
“We removed a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia. The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook,” said the social media giant.
Reportedly, the Russian hackers targeted people in Ukraine and Russia, and the network also reported users in Israel, the US, and Poland.
The company said that the people are reporting the accounts relied on fake, authentic, and duplicate accounts to submit thousands of complaints against their targets through Meta’s abuse reporting tools.
“Many of this network’s accounts were detected and disabled by our automated systems,” said Meta.
Russia had banned Facebook, Google, accused them of spreading misinformation
This comes a month after Russia had announced that it was banning Facebook in the country after the tech giant had enforced restrictions on Russian media on its platform. The Kremlin had cracked down on tech companies, including Twitter, over their arbitrary restriction of Russian state media RT and Sputnik regulations.
Strangely, prior to this, Meta Platforms Inc. had eased its hate speech policy to allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers. Meta Inc. has made temporary changes to its hate speech policy to allow users to post content that calls for violence, including a call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Later, Russia had banned Meta, calling it an extremist organisation and also banned Google News for spreading misinformation.
