A Russian organization linked to covert Kremlin influence campaigns posted more than 8,000 political ads on Facebook, despite European and US restrictions barring companies from doing business with the organization, according to three organizations that track online disinformation.
The Russian group, the Social Design Agency, evaded lax enforcement by Facebook to place about $338,000 worth of ads targeting European users over a 15-month period ending in October, even though the platform itself highlighted the threat, the three organizations said in a report released Friday.
The Social Design Agency has faced punitive sanctions in the European Union since 2023 and in the United States since last April for spreading propaganda and disinformation to unsuspecting users on social media. Facebook advertising campaigns raise “critical questions about the platform’s compliance” with US and European laws, the report said.
The report comes after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced it was changing its rules for the content it allows on its social media platforms, including eliminating fact checks that flag or remove posts. The changes will almost certainly intensify Meta’s confrontation with regulators in Europe over how it handles disinformation and other corrosive content.
The changes include the removal of automatic content restrictions related to race and gender that could run afoul of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to limit illegal and harmful online activities and the spread of misinformation . The 27-nation bloc announced last year that it had launched an investigation into Meta over lax oversight of misleading ads on Facebook and Instagram.
When Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the content policies last week, he appeared to allude to the company’s regulatory battle with the European Union, calling on President-elect Donald J. Trump to “push back against foreign governments.” ” that he said were seeking to limit free speech.
The Social Design Agency is a public relations firm in Moscow that, according to US and European officials, operates a sophisticated influence operation known as the Doppelgänger.
Since 2022, Doppelgänger has created cartoon memes and online clones of real news sites, such as Le Monde and The Washington Post, to spread propaganda and misinformation, often about the war in Ukraine.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report, but noted the company’s own public warnings about Doppelgänger.
Meta first identified the campaign in a threat analysis published in 2022, linking it to the Social Design Agency. It has repeatedly blocked its operations when it finds them, prompting campaign organizers to change tactics to avoid detection.
In another threat analysis in December, Meta said that “we no longer see Doppelgänger trying to direct people to our applications to its domains by impersonating the websites of media or government entities.”
Meta’s analysis noted that the campaigns appeared to have little impact, but the Russian group continued its efforts on other social media sites, including Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr and Medium.
The organizations documenting the campaign – Check First, a Finnish research company, along with Reset.Tech in London and AI Forensics in Paris – focused on efforts to influence Facebook users in France, Germany, Poland and Italy. Doppelgänger has also been linked to influence operations in the United States, Israel and other countries, but they were not included in the report’s findings.
The research was based on thousands of internal documents from the Social Design Agency obtained by two European news organizations, Delfi Estonia and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The Social Design Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The documents included screenshots of the group’s interactions with Meta’s Ad Manager, the platform for businesses to place and track Facebook ads, using inauthentic usernames. The documents allowed researchers to reconstruct the scale and cost of Russian intelligence operations in greater detail than usual.
The researchers estimated that the ads resulted in more than 123,000 user clicks and earned Meta at least $338,000 in the European Union alone. The researchers acknowledged that the figures provide only an incomplete sample of the Russian agency’s efforts.
In addition to promoting Russia’s views on Ukraine, the agency posted ads in response to major news events, including the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and a terrorist attack in a Moscow suburb last March that killed 145 people. Advertisements often appear within 48 hours, attempting to shape public perceptions of events.
After the October 7 attacks, ads promoted false claims that Ukraine was selling weapons to Hamas. The ads reached more than 237,000 accounts over two to three days, “underscoring the operation’s ability to weaponize current events in support of geopolitical narratives,” the researcher’s report said.
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit research organization based in Brussels, said the report highlighted the need for Meta to do more, not less, to combat disinformation and for EU regulators to hold the company accountable. .
“If Europe is to be a sovereign entity with its own laws, those laws must be enforced by other platforms and actors,” he said. “Failure to enforce them properly raises serious concerns about sovereignty and whether Europe can ensure that its laws are respected on its territory.”
