{"id":20408,"date":"2022-04-17T11:34:42","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T11:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=20408"},"modified":"2022-04-17T11:36:09","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T11:36:09","slug":"facebook-struggles-as-russia-steps-up-presence-in-unstable-west-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2022\/04\/17\/facebook-struggles-as-russia-steps-up-presence-in-unstable-west-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook struggles as Russia steps up presence in unstable west Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook is struggling to contain pro-Russian and anti-western posts that are contributing to political instability in west Africa, investigators and analysts have said.<\/p>\n

The platform, which has expanded rapidly across the continent in recent years, has made significant investment in content moderation, but still faces enormous challenges in curbing deliberate disinformation campaigns. One major area of concern is the strategically important Sahel region, which has suffered\u00a0a series of military takeovers\u00a0over the last 18 months.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Campaigns on Facebook appear to have prepared the ground for many of the coups, pushing an anti-western, pro-Russian agenda that has undermined governments. The efforts are similar to the \u201chybrid warfare\u201d campaign launched by Moscow in Ukraine and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

A report by investigators from the Digital Forensic Lab, a global network of digital forensic researchers run by US-based thinktank the Atlantic Council, reveals how\u00a0pro-Russian Facebook pages in Mali\u00a0coordinated support for anti-democracy protests and the Wagner group, a controversial Russian private military contractor that was invited into the unstable country last year after the overthrow of President Bah N\u2019daw by the military.<\/p>\n

The US and others have alleged that Wagner is funded by the powerful businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is closely linked to Vladimir Putin. It has a growing presence in Africa and its mercenaries have been deployed in Mozambique, Sudan, Libya and in Central African Republic, where Wagner group fighters committed human rights abuses while\u00a0fighting alongside government forces against rebels,\u00a0according to a group of independent UN experts. Prigozhin and the Kremlin have denied any knowledge of Wagner.<\/p>\n

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\"Yevgeny<\/div>
Yevgeny Prigozhin assisting Vladimir Putin with his dinner at an event outside Moscow in 2011.<\/span>\u00a0Photograph: Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Western officials described Wagner as the \u201cthin end of the wedge\u201d and a \u201cTrojan horse\u201d for a Russian effort to extend its influence covertly in resource-rich and unstable parts of the continent. Earlier this year, France announced that it was withdrawing thousands of troops from Mali, ending a near decade-long effort to fight Islamist insurgents from bases there. The Wagner group has deployed between 400 and 600 fighters, trainers and support staff to Mali and appears to have already launched offensive operations against extremists.<\/p>\n

In early April\u00a0Human Rights Watch reported\u00a0that suspected Russian mercenaries had participated in an operation with Mali\u2019s army in March in which about 300 civilians died. HRW did not mention Wagner specifically.<\/p>\n

The DFR Lab identified a coordinated network of five pages pushing narratives that promoted Russian intervention in Mali while disparaging the west, and France in particular. The pages have published nearly 24,000 posts and are followed by more than 140,000 accounts.<\/p>\n

In September 2021, the pages of the network began promoting Wagner as an alternative to the French forces. Pages in the network frequently posted identical content, often less than 20 seconds apart, the DFR Lab found.<\/p>\n

In a second report, DFR investigators found that\u00a0pro-Russian content spread on Facebook in west Africa\u00a0in the months before the military takeover in Burkina Faso in January. Hours after the coup there, demonstrators in Ouagadougou, the country\u2019s capital, chanted pro-Russian and anti-French slogans.<\/p>\n

Independent fact-checkers labelled several posts as misleading, including a pro-Russian page that repurposed images of apparently well-equipped hobbyists in combat gear as Russian soldiers.<\/p>\n

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\"People<\/div>
People on the streets of Ouagadougou on 25 January after Burkina Faso\u2019s army announced it had deposed President Roch Kabor\u00e9.<\/span>\u00a0Photograph: Lambert Ouedraogo\/EPA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The DFRLab has an ongoing partnership with Facebook to independently monitor the platform for disinformation campaigns, with a particular emphasis on election interference, and receives funding from Meta.<\/p>\n

Facebook declined to take down the pages described in the reports when alerted, saying that though posts were clearly part of a coordinated effort, they did not appear to be a front for unidentified users and so \u201cinauthentic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many posts that breached Facebook\u2019s moderation polices have been labelled as false or misleading after being investigated by third-party fact-checkers, a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

Toussaint Nothias, research director at the Digital Civil Society Lab of Stanford University, who has worked extensively on Facebook, said the decision was surprising and underlined the big challenge of effective content moderation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe boundary between inauthentic and authentic coordinated behaviour is very tricky to manage. Authentic coordinated behaviour can often resemble social movements, and determining when this behaviour is harmful depends largely on the context and standpoint,\u201d Nothias said.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Facebook\u2019s owner, Meta, said the company took the problem of coordinated campaigns seeking to manipulate public debate very seriously and was taking aggressive steps to fight the spread of misinformation in Africa as elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve built the largest global third-party fact-checking network of any platform and in the last few years we\u2019ve more than doubled the number of countries we cover across the continent,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cWhile nobody can eliminate misinformation from society entirely, we continue to consult with outside experts, grow our fact-checking program, and improve our technology to tackle it on our services in the most comprehensive and effective way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Protesters<\/div>
Protesters hold a banner reading \u2018Thank you Wagner\u2019 during a demonstration in Bamako in February celebrating France\u2019s announcement that it was withdrawing its troops from Mali.<\/span>\u00a0Photograph: Florent Vergnes\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Facebook has moved repeatedly in recent years to take down hundreds of \u201cinauthentic\u201d accounts targeting Africa, many linked to Moscow.<\/p>\n

In October 2019, Facebook\u00a0took down three networks of accounts\u00a0linked to Prigozhin. The accounts were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics in eight countries: Madagascar, the CAR, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya.<\/p>\n

In 2020, Facebook targeted\u00a0a second Russian-led network of professional trolls\u00a0outsourced to Ghanaian and Nigerian operatives.<\/p>\n

The DFR report on the recent Mali accounts \u2013 and Facebook\u2019s decision not to take down the network \u2013 underlines the risk of actors exploiting loopholes in the company\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n

Experts say influencing efforts have become more sophisticated, and are likely to involve hiring individuals who will push a particular narrative. This makes it much harder to establish whether such operations are \u201cinauthentic\u201d and thus breach Facebook policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not bots any more. The major [social media] firms are very good at identifying bots \u2026 There are real people behind the accounts.\u201d The trend has been a tactical shift for Prigozhin-linked operations. Local operators offer a better understanding of the context on the ground and a level of plausible deniability,\u201d said Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.<\/p>\n

Jean Le Roux, author of the new DFR report, said those behind the most recent networks could have been people in Mali who were genuinely supportive of Russia\u2019s efforts and anti-French, or members of a \u201cfranchising operation using locals who know the slang, the vernacular\u201d<\/p>\n

story by Jason Burke<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook is struggling to contain pro-Russian and anti-western posts that are contributing to political instability in west Africa, investigators and analysts have said. The platform, which has expanded rapidly across the continent in recent years, has made significant investment in content moderation, but still faces enormous challenges in curbing deliberate disinformation campaigns. One major area […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":20409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1648,4899,12487,8217,2701,960,1451,2272,10387,11583,13175,1065,6848,8982,596,6731,11399,12326,10391,11606,913,2884,5978,5241,11538,911,10427,5468,9127,11897,5575,6351,4521,2264,11537,10840,5661,6396,11062,9343,5459,1152,5050,10256,5317,9477,8396,5572,5340,1134,12187,5549,11973,5979,7980,8386,5424,3805,9320,12526,11171,71,6858,5807,5980,3457,5217,5659,1649,5349,5618,6730,6675,9178,5180,5465,214,6348,694,9318,10292,10943,5981,3954,594,7986],"class_list":["post-20408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-africa","tag-african","tag-agenda","tag-army","tag-behaviour","tag-burkina-faso","tag-businessman","tag-cameroon","tag-campaign","tag-capital","tag-car","tag-central-african-republic","tag-civilians","tag-combat","tag-congo","tag-coup","tag-debate","tag-decade","tag-declined","tag-democracy","tag-democratic","tag-demonstration","tag-dfrlab","tag-died","tag-digital","tag-election","tag-epa","tag-facebook","tag-february","tag-forensic","tag-france","tag-french","tag-ghanaian","tag-government","tag-harmful","tag-human-rights","tag-human-rights-watch","tag-hybrid","tag-internet","tag-investment","tag-ivory-coast","tag-kremlin","tag-libya","tag-madagascar","tag-mali","tag-mercenaries","tag-meta","tag-military","tag-moscow","tag-mozambique","tag-n","tag-nigerian","tag-one","tag-ouagadougou","tag-overthrow","tag-platform","tag-politics","tag-president","tag-prigozhin","tag-pro-russian","tag-protesters","tag-putin","tag-rebels","tag-risk","tag-roch-kabore","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-russian-soldiers","tag-sahel","tag-social-media","tag-soldiers","tag-sudan","tag-technology","tag-troops","tag-ukraine","tag-un","tag-university","tag-us","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-wagner","tag-wagner-group","tag-watch","tag-west-africa","tag-will","tag-who","tag-yevgeny-prigozhin"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}