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A new report highlights how a Kremlin-related covert influence operation continued to run classified ads on Facebook despite the actions of the United States and the European Union. prohibitions on doing business with the organization.
By Steven Lee Myers and Adam Satariano
The authors have written extensively about Russia and the phenomena of foreign disinformation and propaganda on social media.
A Russian organization connected to the Kremlin’s covert influence campaigns ran more than 8,000 classified political ads on Facebook despite European and U. S. restrictions banning corporations from doing business with the organization, according to three organizations that track disinformation online.
Russian group Social Design Agency escaped Facebook’s lax enforcement to run classified ads worth an estimated $338,000 targeting European users over a 15-month period ending in October, even as the platform itself highlighted the threat, the three organizations said in a report. released on Friday.
The Social Design Agency has been facing punitive sanctions in the European Union since 2023 and in the United States since April for spreading propaganda and disinformation to unsuspecting users on social media. Facebook’s ad campaigns raise “crucial questions about the platform’s compliance” with U. S. and European laws, according to the report.
The report follows Facebook parent company Meta’s announcement that it will change its regulations around the content it allows on its social media platforms, adding the removal of fact checks that flagged or removed postsArray. The adjustments will almost certainly accentuate Meta’s confrontation with European regulators over how it handles disinformation and other corrosive content.
The changes include lifting automatic restrictions on content regarding race and gender that could run afoul of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to restrict illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation. The 27-nation bloc announced last year that it had launched an investigation into Meta over poor oversight of deceptive advertisements on Facebook and Instagram.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the content policies last week, he appeared to allude to the company’s regulatory fight with the European Union, calling on President-elect Donald J. Trump to “push governments back. ” foreigners” who, according to him, were seeking to limit freedom of expression.
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