The latest campaign in central and northern Africa is the first well-documented case of Russia “franchising,” or outsourcing, its disinformation efforts to local parties, said Facebook and the Stanford researchers. It’s unusual for a nation to try to influence so many countries at once, they said.
Shelby Grossman, one of the Stanford researchers, said that Russians in some cases set up local media organizations in the African countries to employ locals who would post the propaganda and false content on Facebook. In other cases, the Russians hired existing media groups to do so.
Facebook said it was unclear specifically when the Russian activity in central and northern Africa started because the Russians took over some existing pages on the social network. But the posts ramped up last year when the influence networks bought Facebook ads. In total, the networks spent more than $87,000 on Facebook ads.
The networks often posted about political news, including elections in Madagascar and Mozambique. They sought to drive Facebook users from the platform and into public groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, which are encrypted messaging apps, to increase interaction. And they used Facebook Live videos, Google Forms and quizzes to draw people into their Facebook pages and groups.
Some of the Facebook pages pushing Russian disinformation were not sophisticated. A cluster of pages posing as Libyan news entities posted about Libyan issues, but the page managers were in Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries, said the Stanford researchers. Some of the pages experienced unnatural jumps in followers and other telltale signs of inauthentic behavior.
Mr. Gleicher said some of the Russian-run pages and groups also used compromised Facebook accounts that once belonged to real people but had been stolen and repurposed by hackers. He said that Facebook is still building out its automated systems for detecting compromised accounts, so the company still misses some and pulls in its investigative team to catch them.
Facebook said its investigation had “connected these campaigns to entities associated with” Mr. Prigozhin, but the company declined to say how. Mr. Prigozhin controlled the entity that financed Russia’s Internet Research Agency.