Meta caught an Israeli marketing firm using fake Facebook accounts to run an influence campaign on its platform, the company said in its latest report on coordinated inauthentic behavior. The scheme targeted people in the US and Canada and posted about the Israel-Hamas war.
In all, Metaās researchers uncovered 510 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one group that were tied to the effort, including fake and previously hacked accounts. The accounts posed as āJewish students, African Americans and āconcernedā citizensā and shared posts that praised Israelās military actions and criticized the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and college protests. They also shared Islamaophobic comments in Canada, saying that āradical Islam poses a threat to liberal values in Canada.ā
Metaās researchers said the campaign was linked to STOIC, a āa political marketing and business intelligence firmā based in Israel, though they didnāt speculate on the motives behind it. STOIC was also active on X and YouTube and ran websites āfocused on the Israel-Hamas war and Middle Eastern politics.ā
According to Meta, the campaign was discovered before it could build up a large audience and many of the fake accounts were disabled by the companyās automated systems. The accounts reached about 500 followers on Facebook and about 2,000 on Instagram.
The report also notes that the people behind the accounts seemed to use generative AI tools to write many of their comments on the pages of politicians, media organizations and other public figures.āThese comments generally linked to the operationsā websites, but they were often met with critical responses from authentic users calling them propaganda,ā Metaās policy director for threat disruption, David Agranovich, said during a briefing with reporters āSo far, we have not seen novel Gen AI driven tactics that would impede our ability to disrupt the adversarial networks behind them.ā
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-caught-an-israeli-marketing-firm-running-hundreds-of-fake-facebook-accounts-150021954.html?src=rss