Meta: Russia tops disinformation ops, followed by Iran and China

Russia still tops the world in disinformation campaigns, even as other countries are stepping up their own operations, according to Facebook parent company Meta, whose quarterly Adversarial Threat Report once again placed Russia above all other nations when it comes to disinformation campaigns.

“Russia remains the number one source of global (coordinated inauthentic behavior) networks we’ve disrupted to date since 2017, with 39 covert influence operations,” wrote Meta.

“The next most frequent sources of foreign interference are Iran, with 31 CIB networks, and China, with 11. This year, our teams have taken down around 20 new covert influence operations around the world, including in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the US.”

According to Meta, Russia has consistently been the biggest purveyor of disinformation operations since it began collecting data for the quarterly report. In fact, Meta said that it was the Kremlin’s 2016 Facebook campaign with the Internet Research Agency that lead it to begin publishing the report in the first place.

However, Russia is not alone in its efforts to sway opinion online with nefarious methods. Meta said that it also logged an increase in CIB operations originating in Iran, China, and in one case even Moldova.

While such attacks can occasionally sway public opinion on key global events such as elections and international conflicts, Meta said that more often than not they fall short of their intended goals and instead operators have to resort to fudging their numbers by paying for likes and engagements.

The social media company said that in such cases, the schemes are relatively easy to spot because much of the engagement comes from outside the targeted countries and regions.

“The majority of the CIB networks we’ve disrupted this year have struggled to build authentic audiences, and some used fake likes and followers to appear more popular,” Meta explained in its report.

“For example, we took down a CIB network originating primarily in the Transnistria region of Moldova, and targeted Russian-speaking audiences in Moldova. The vast majority of its followers were outside of Moldova, which suggests the use of inauthentic engagement tactics to make these efforts appear more popular than they actually were.”