Facebook says fake accounts used coronavirus content to attract followers

Facebook removed 1,887 accounts, pages, and groups associated with Russia, Iran, the United States, and other countries in April that misled users about their identity and purpose. Some of these users shared posts about the coronavirus pandemic to attract more followers.

“We have seen threat actors use the coronavirus pandemic and the coronavirus pandemic discussion in the same way that threat actors use other types of major events around the world,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Facebook’s cyber security policy.

Facebook has destroyed a total of eight networks of fake accounts, pages, and groups created before the outbreak of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel corona virus. But the pandemic offered some of the fake accounts an opportunity to attract more followers or lure people to their pages or websites.

The largest network of accounts that Facebook removed in April was connected to the Espersona media company in Georgia, which is now excluded from the services of the social network. The social media giant has removed 511 Facebook pages, 101 Facebook accounts, 56 Instagram accounts and 122 groups. Facebook has the Instagram photo app. Users pretended to be news agencies, using fake names and pictures. They also shared content about the corona virus, which violated Facebook’s rules for harmful information. Espersona did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a post, Georgia’s Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia is shown in front of a yellow and black picture labeled “Kill Corona Volume 1”. The post is a reference to “Kill Bill”, a popular film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.

In the United States, a smaller network of fake accounts linked to the anti-immigration website VDARE released information about how white people were hit by the corona virus in certain states. VDARE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Another account network in the United States was connected QAnon, an online community that promotes right-wing conspiracy theories through deep state planning to overthrow President Donald Trump.

A post posted by a QAnon account contains a video that states that it is documentation about the origins of the corona virus and is not shown by the media.

The same said that each network of accounts had different targets that had nothing to do with the corona virus. Facebook also closed accounts related to Mauritania and Myanmar in April.

“We saw that they use corona virus content to achieve these goals in the same way that we saw other actors, so it was pretty opportunistic,” he said. “When you try to build a target audience, you want to use news from the topic everyone is already talking about, corona virus.”