Campaigning for Ukraine’s presidential election had just begun to heat up when the authorities announced they had thwarted a Russian plot to use Facebook to undermine the vote.
Unlike the 2016 interference in the United States, which centered on fake Facebook pages created by Russians in faraway St. Petersburg, the operation in Ukraine this year had a clever twist. It tried to circumvent Facebook’s new safeguards by paying Ukrainian citizens to give a Russian agent access to their personal pages.
In a video confession published by the S.B.U., Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, a man it identified as the Russian agent said that he resided in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, and that his Russian handlers had ordered him “to find people in Ukraine on Facebook who wanted to sell their accounts or temporarily rent them out.”
“As I learned,” said the man, who was not identified by name, “their goal was to use those accounts to publish political ads or to plant fake articles.”
Unlike the 2016 interference in the United States, which centered on fake Facebook pages created by Russians in faraway St. Petersburg, the operation in Ukraine this year had a clever twist. It tried to circumvent Facebook’s new safeguards by paying Ukrainian citizens to give a Russian agent access to their personal pages.
The question ahead of the election in Ukraine, scheduled for Sunday, is whether Facebook has evolved as well.
The vote presents Facebook with an opportunity to take what it has learned and confront Russia over what the Kremlin considers its home turf. Ukraine has long been a testing ground for all manner of so-called Russian active measures, and was among the first hit with the kind of electoral manipulation later deployed against the United States, France and other countries.
Facebook officials insist the company is ready. It fired an opening salvo in January when it announced the takedown of a coordinated effort involving nearly 150 fake accounts, which appeared to mimic a disinformation campaign by Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2018 midterm election campaign in the United States. On Tuesday, the company announced another takedown involving nearly 2,000 Russia-linked pages, groups and accounts, some involved in posting disinformation about Ukraine.
(source New Your Times)
Is Russia only a bandit state ?
Transparancy International has issued it’s latest evaluation of international corruption. Russia is near the top of the scale of corruption, at No. 121 out of 163 in 2006, just ahead of Rwanda and right behind Phillipines. We hope the russians will join the civilized world.
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