Meta says has removed hundreds of fake Facebook, Instagram accounts from Malaysian 'troll farm', alleges link to police
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- 01 Sep 2022
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Meta, the parent company behind Facebook and Instagram, said in a recent report it had identified and removed over 600 accounts across all its social network platforms for violating the policy against “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, with most of them alleged to be part of a “troll farm” to corrupt or manipulate public discourse using fake accounts.
Meta claimed in its Quarterly Adversarial Threat report released yesterday this network of fake accounts posted memes in the Malay language in support of the current government coalition and attempting to paint its critics as corrupt, in addition to promoting police.
“Typically, their posting activity accelerated during weekdays, taking breaks for lunch. Their fake accounts were fairly under-developed and some of them used stolen profile pictures.
“Some of them were detected and disabled by our automated systems,” the company said in the report.
To date, it said it has removed 596 Facebook accounts, 180 pages, 11 groups and 72 Instagram accounts. Meta said its investigation found that these accounts were linked to the Malaysian police force.
“We found this network after reviewing information about a small portion of this activity initially suspected to have originated in China by researchers at Clemson University. Although the people behind it attempted to conceal their identity and coordination, our investigation found links to the Royal Malaysia Police.”
Malay Mail is seeking comments from the police over the accusation.
The bogus pages and accounts were said to have some 427,000 followers, while 4,000 accounts joined one or more of these groups and about 15,000 accounts followed one or more of these Instagram accounts.
Many of these accounts were also said to have spent up to US$6,000 (about RM26,739) for ads on Facebook and Instagram, paid for primarily in ringgit. Read More...
