Between August 2023 and October 2024, Facebook earned at least $338,000 from propaganda campaigns orchestrated by a Russian communications agency directly linked to the Kremlin.
More than 8,000 political advertisements were published in Europe, reaching millions of people, primarily in four targeted countries: France, Germany, Poland, and Italy. The period covered the European elections, which took place in June 2024. The results saw huge gains by far-right parties, heightening suspicions of covert backing by the Kremlin.
This was reported on Friday by the newspaper Le Soir, based on an investigation conducted by Finnish company CheckFirst in collaboration with NGOs Reset Tech and AI Forensics.
These political ads were aimed at destabilising public opinion. They were able to slip through Facebook's moderation net despite the entity creating the adverts – the Social Design Agency (SDA) – was on a list of sanctions from the European Commission, the UK and the US.
These propaganda campaigns were broadcast despite sanctions against Russia, Facebook’s verification programme set by its parent company Meta, and the restrictions of the European Digital Services Act.
According to CheckFirst, these campaigns, which did not directly target Belgium, appeared as “sponsored content” on Facebook’s newsfeed.
Based in Moscow, the SDA was in fact the initiator of 'Operation dOPpelgänger’, as it was dubbed by the NGO Eu DisinfoLab in September 2022. The operation impersonated public figures or media brands (including Belgium's Le Soir who broke this story) by creating fake websites to spread disinformation on Facebook.
Meta claims to have identified 6,000 incriminated domain names in this case, but these latest findings demonstrate influence campaigns are still underway with very little action being taken. It will likely worsen as Meta moves further away from fact-checking and harmful content moderation.
