Meta’s ‘critical shortcomings’ led to Russian disinformation campaign on platform: report

A covert Russian-led disinformation campaign evaded Meta restrictions and got through more than 8,000 political ads on Facebook despite regulations in the United States and Europe barring companies from conducting business with the organization, a new report revealed.

The Russian IT firm, the Social Design Agency, which has been linked to the Kremlin’s propaganda campaigns, spent an estimated $338,000 in Facebook ads targeting European users, according to The New York Times, citing a report that came out Friday from three groups that track disinformation online.

Its release comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company announced the termination of its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., which the Times noted “will almost certainly intensify Meta’s confrontation with regulators in Europe over how it handles disinformation and other corrosive content.”

And Meta itself already “highlighted the threat,” the Times reported.

The organization at the center of the report is already under punitive sanction in the European Union and the U.S. “for spreading propaganda and disinformation to unsuspecting users on social media,” according to the Times.

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The Facebook ad campaigns expose “critical shortcomings in Meta’s systems to curb the spread of state-sponsored influence — shortcomings that, in turn, create financial rewards for the platform,” the report said.

It also raises “highlights significant concerns related to Meta’s compliance” with laws in the U.S. and Europe, according to the report.

“The SDA operated through a network of anonymous accounts, using false identities to create pages and publish ads. Meta’s failure to enforce strict identity verification allowed these accounts to persist,” the report said of the Russian organization.

The report highlighted “the need for Meta to do more, not less, to fight disinformation, and for E.U. regulators to hold the company accountable,” Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a nonprofit research organization based in Brussels, told the Times.

“If Europe is to be a sovereign entity with its own laws, those laws must be applied by platforms and other actors,” he said to the publication. “A failure to enforce them properly raises serious concerns about sovereignty and whether Europe can ensure its laws are respected on its own territory.”