Facebook takes down Ukrainian troll farm pages. Here is how they worked

On 16 September in the post “Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior From Iraq and Ukraine” on Facebook Newsroom, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher wrote that the company took down multiple pages, groups, and accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. Two unconnected groups of misleading accounts conducted two unconnected “operations” originated in Iraq and Ukraine, according to Facebook. This is the first time a significant troll farm has been revealed in Ukraine.

What were the activities of the deleted accounts, groups, and pages and who was behind them?

Facebook removed 168 accounts, 149 Facebook Pages, and 79 Groups for “engaging in domestic-focused coordinated inauthentic behavior in Ukraine.” Company’s review linked their activity to Pragmatico, a Ukrainian PR firm. The fake accounts had less than 4.2 million followers, the groups had 401,000 members. The troll farm spent about $1.6 mn on Facebook and Instagram ads paid for in US dollars.

Slidstvo.info and Hromadske investigated how Pragmatico’s troll farm worked and released the fifty-minute documentary ‘I am a bot.” The investigation shows that the farm published multiple comments on Facebook to support two candidates who later succeeded in getting into the parliament as majoritarian deputies. These were two persons displaced from the occupied territories of the Donbas – Donetsk comedian Serhiy Syvokho, Zelenskyy’s friend who participated in his TV projects, and MP Serhiy Shakhov of Kadiivka (Luhansk Oblast).

A month before the parliamentary elections, a bot group was formed to support former defense minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko whose party Civil Position surveys put under the five-percent electoral threshold with about 2% ratings. On the 17th day before the elections, the group suddenly received instructions to stop commenting in favor of Hrytsenko. Around that day the surveys clearly showed that his party won’t manage to pass the threshold, thus Hrytsenko could stop paying for further bot promotion.

The fact of using bots in favor of some politician doesn’t necessarily mean that the person question hired them himself. For example, Syvokho ran for an MP for the first time in his life following a request of his friend, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Zelenskyy’s HQ could be interested that the candidate from their party received a seat in the parliament.

Unfortunately, the investigation revealed the activities of only one group of Pragmatico’s bots and it is unclear how far the scope of the company’s activities reaches.

Source: http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/09/20/facebook-removed-ukrainian-political-troll-farm-accounts-and-pages-who-was-behind-them/

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