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CNN
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People “connected to the US military” may be behind a network of Facebook accounts and Instagram stories that promote US interests abroad by targeting audiences in Afghanistan and Central Asia, Facebook parent company Meta said Tuesday.
This is a rare case of an American tech giant tying a cyber influencer to Washington rather than a foreign government.
Meta said he had taken down 32 Facebook accounts and 22 Instagram accounts that violated the park’s policy on “inappropriate behavior.”
Meta did not tie the job to any US military command. But the Pentagon opened a major review in September into the units involved in cyber influence activities, including the US Central Command, the Washington Post previously reported.
CNN has requested information from the Pentagon and Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, about Meta’s findings.
The fake Facebook accounts taken by Meta said, among other things, that the US is helping the Asian country of Tajikistan to stabilize its border with Afghanistan, and that Washington is the key to the stability of region, according to researchers from the analysis company Graphika and the Stanford Internet. Observatory, which documented the activities in an August report.
News about Afghanistan peaked “at times of strategic importance for the US,” according to the study, including months before the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. August 2021.
The people behind the accounts had the opportunity to “hide their identity” and the actions from Facebook and Instagram users were limited, Meta said on Tuesday.
One former U.S. official who has been involved in Russia’s affairs has lamented the unwarranted nature of the influence exercise — or at least the fact that the U.S. military is testing it.
“I get the urge, it’s important in military circles, ‘the only way to lose is not to play’ in the talk zone,'” Gavin Wilde, who manages the power Russia’s threats and cyber issues at the National Security Council in 2018 and 2019, told CNN.
“However, if their methods mimic the transparency and reliability that the US wants to claim as a benchmark for an alternative to the Russian or Chinese model, is the price really worth it?” Wilde, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, added.
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