The social networking site Facebook revealed that it has removed a network of accounts, pages and groups in Ethiopia due to false behavior as it was targeting Ethiopian citizens in Ethiopia.
The Facebook administration said in an official post that “there are some people behind this activity in coordination with each other and used fake accounts as an essential part of their operations to mislead about who they are and what they do, and we investigated these operations, and the focus was on behavior rather than content, regardless of who Who stands behind it, or what they publish, or whether they are foreign or local.
“This network primarily published in Amharic about news and current events in Ethiopia, including the Prosperity Party, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, as well as criticism of Egypt and Sudan regarding the Grand Renaissance Dam project in Ethiopia. They also published critical comments about several politicians and opposition groups in Ethiopia, including the Oromo Liberation Front, the Ethiopian Democratic Party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, and others.
Most recently, they commented on protests against US sanctions on Ethiopia.
"We removed 65 Facebook accounts, 52 Pages, 27 groups, and 32 Instagram accounts for violating our policies," Facebook said in its statement. Most of these groups are ad spend of about $6,200 on paid advertising.”
"The operation used duplicate and fake accounts - some of which have already been detected and disabled by our automated systems for posting and commenting on their content, and for managing groups and Pages, including those posing as media entities.
As the campaign appears to have been publishing activity from 2020 to 2021, some of its recent content has been classified as false by independent fact-checkers and described as misleading. Some accounts have undergone significant name changes over time and have also used spam-like techniques to spread the same content across multiple pages and groups simultaneously, including other people's groups.
"Over the past four years, we've shared our findings about inauthentic behavior that we detect and remove from our platforms," Facebook added.
Each month, we publish reports where we share information about the networks we remove over the course of each month to make it easier to see what we're achieving in one place and we also share our findings and investigate the elimination of this abuse.
Although the people behind this network attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to individuals linked to INSA or the Information Network Security Agency in Ethiopia, the information network security agency in Ethiopia.
The Source: almasryalyoum.com