Over the past three and a half years, Facebook has always shared its findings of coordinated inauthentic behavior that they detect and remove the culprits from their platforms. As part of their regular CIB reports, they released interesting findings in the course of January and Uganda seemed to feature endlessly. The report comes after the social media ban in Uganda has been lifted on all apps apart from Facebook.
ALSO READ: Govt lifts social media ban but there is a catch
According to Facebook, In January, they removed two networks of accounts, Pages and Groups. “One network from Uganda targeted domestic audiences in its own country” the statement read in part. This was part of the company’s effort in rooting out this abuse online. They company says that it is committed to continually improving to stay ahead. Which involves building better technology, hiring more people and working closely with law enforcement, security experts and other companies.
The social media giant removed 220 Accounts, 32 Pages, 59 Groups and 139 Instagram accounts that originated in Uganda and targeted domestic audiences. Their investigation found links to the Government Citizens Interaction Center at the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology in Uganda. They found this network after reviewing information about a portion of its activity shared with them by researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Given the impending election in Uganda, once they completed their investigation, they moved quickly to take down this network in early January.
Facebook found several clusters of connected activity where Ugandans were using fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, or impersonate at least one public figure, comment on other people’s content and post in multiple groups at once to make their content appear more popular.
Facebook exposes ruling party
Facebook says the first cluster of this activity focused on posting on support of the president of Uganda and the ruling party (NRM). The second cluster posted about Lieutenant General Muhoozi Kainerugaba as a potential future presidential candidate. Finally the last cluster focused on commenting on the opposition pages, targeting the National Unity Platform in particular the candidate Bobi Wine. Much of this network was amplified by other fake accounts according to Facebook. “Some of these pages re posted content from local news aggregators and pro-NRM blogs” the statement read in part.
As of today, Twitter has also started blocked Pro-NRM bloggers from its platform.
Read full report here.
Facebook’s CIB is a coordinated effort to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation. There are two tiers of these activities that they work to stop: 1) coordinated inauthentic behavior in the context of domestic, non-government campaigns and 2) coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government actor.
