Facebook dismantled a Russian disinformation operation that sought to discredit AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines against Covid-19, including by seeking to make it appear that the former "turned vaccinated people into chimpanzees."
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"Disinformation is not always subtle," Ben Nimmo, director of one of Facebook's cybersecurity services, noted ironically at a press conference Tuesday.
The California-based social media giant is regularly accused of contributing to the massive dissemination of disinformation. Last month, US President Joe Biden even estimated that Facebook and other platforms were "killing" people by letting what he termed "fake news" about the Covid vaccination circulate.
"This campaign worked like a laundromat," said the social media giant.
A British communications firm, Fazze, was responsible for disseminating misleading articles and petitions as widely as possible on various forums and networks, including Reddit, Medium, Change.org, Facebook, and Instagram, via fake profiles but also influencers.
This is what precipitated the detection of this operation: in May, several French and German influencers, active in the field of health and science, denounced offers they had received to denigrate the Pfizer vaccine for payment.
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"Unbelievable. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus. They never had a facility there, it's an aesthetic laser center! All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles ... who have been disappearing since this morning. Everyone has worked in Russia before," Leo Grasset, a science popularizer with 1.17 million subscribers to his Youtube channel, tweeted.
In the end, most of the content posted on Instagram – mainly targeting India and Latin America – received "no likes," Facebook said. "It fell flat," said Nimmo.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
