U.S. tech giant Facebook has removed dozens of fake accounts that spread so-called “black PR” and offensive content against Ukrainian politicians during the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.
The accounts were set up by Ukrainian marketing agency Postmen, Facebook told journalists on July 8, 2020. The agency has been spreading propaganda and offensive content through its network of fake Facebook accounts, which it has created over the years.
Facebook has managed to take down 72 user accounts and 35 public pages on Facebook as well as 13 accounts on Instagram, a social media company that belongs to Facebook.
Postmen did not immediately respond to a request for comment and then stopped picking up the phone.
Overall, Postmen’s fake accounts had gained nearly 800,000 followers since 2011. They spread content that Facebook estimated would cost nearly $2 million to share.
Forty more Postmen-backed accounts were also detected on Twitter, according to social media analytics company Graphika.
It is unknown who Postmen is working for, Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy at Facebook, told the Kyiv Post.
Ukrainian news siteThe Babel published an investigation about Postmen’s involvement in spreading propaganda online back in April 2019, prior to the presidential elections in Ukraine. Postmen refused to comment on the investigation back then.
Facebook reported that the people behind the fake pages followed one narrative: They praised Ukraine’s ex-President Petro Poroshenko and attacked his then-political rivals Volodymyr Zelensky and Yulia Tymoshenko.
The fake accounts often posted sexualized images of Tymoshenko, also saying that she is corrupt; they pictured Zelensky as an infant or the puppet of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Attackers would use the pages Stop Yulia or Baroness of Lies, both targeting Tymoshenko.
An internet meme posted by the propagandistic Facebook page Yulia Stop on Jan. 20, 2020. It says: When Yulia Tymoshenko goes for a walk in the park, she doesn’t feed the pigeons, she promises to feed them.
As for Zelensky, many Poroshenko’s supporters on the internet — including fake Facebook users — blame Zelensky’s supporters for being eager “to conciliate with Russia.”
“(This) reflects a broader cleavage in Ukrainian politics,” Facebook stated.
Several examples of internet memes mocking now-President Volodymyr Zelensky’s relationship with Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
Among the most popular Postmen pages was also Boycott the Party of Regions, which targeted ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled the country after the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014. It had gained 127,000 followers before Facebook removed it.
Some of these accounts had been managed by Postmen since 2014, the year when Russia annexed Crimea, up until Facebook took them down. Some content shared by these accounts was overtly anti-Russian and nationalist.
Some of the latest anti-Russian posts took aim at French dairy company Danone, which is also one of the Postmen agency’s clients, according to its website.
On April 22, Danone released a controversial ad with Russian actor Mikhail Porechenkov — an avid supporter of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. In response, Ukrainians flooded the company’s Facebook page with angry comments and boycotted its products. Finally, Danone removed the ad on June 10.
Danone could not be reached for comment.
The latest page that Facebook has taken down is called The Lame Ministry. It criticizes the Ukrainian government and local media, and was created on May 21, 2020, according to Facebook.
