Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has recently uncovered a coordinated, inauthentic behaviour campaign orchestrated by an Israeli marketing firm.
The scheme involved the use of hundreds of fake Facebook accounts to run an influence campaign on the platform. The primary targets were users in the United States and Canada, and the content focused on the Israel-Hamas war.
Meta’s researchers identified 510 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, 32 Instagram accounts, and one group that were part of this effort. These accounts posed as various personas, including “Jewish students,” “African Americans,” and “concerned citizens.”
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The fake accounts shared posts that praised Israel’s military actions while simultaneously criticizing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and college protests. Additionally, they propagated Islamophobic comments in Canada, claiming that “radical Islam poses a threat to liberal values in Canada.”
The campaign was traced back to STOIC, a political marketing and business intelligence firm based in Israel. However, Meta’s report refrains from speculating on the motives behind this influence operation.
STOIC was also active on X and YouTube, running websites specifically focused on the Israel-Hamas war and broader Middle Eastern politics.
Notably, the people behind these fake accounts appeared to use generative AI tools to craft many of their comments on the pages of politicians, media organizations, and other public figures. These comments often linked back to the operations’ websites but faced critical responses from authentic users who recognized them as propaganda.
Fortunately, Meta detected the campaign before it could amass a large audience. Many of the fake accounts were promptly disabled by the company’s automated systems. The accounts have reached approximately 500 followers on Facebook and around 2,000 on Instagram.
Meta’s policy director for threat disruption, David Agranovich, emphasized that while this campaign didn’t employ novel AI-driven tactics, the company remains vigilant in disrupting adversarial networks.
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