In what considered to be a great fraud in recent times, Cambridge Analytica (by leveraging Facebook) was alleged to be influencing the beliefs of thousands of people with ads at Trump’s campaign time. Now, Facebook has identified the trend of a few groups and people using AI to fake accounts to enhance Trump’s reputation across the web starting from its platform.
Disinformation Research Groups
Ever since the big companies are dealing with big data, everyone’s thinking about an IT war arising one day. And this step of actors leveraging AI in fueling the fake propaganda is what analysts think to be one of the first stages of the war.
Disinformation Researchers from Graphika and DFR labs have reported many examples of few actors using Artificial Intelligence to create fake profile pictures and performing an “Inauthentic Social Media campaign”. As Facebook detailed, it has already removed 610 Facebook accounts, 156 groups, 89 pages, and 72 Instagram accounts that were associated with such acts. Further, it connected dots with another media source called The Epoch Times.
The BL Group
A news group called BL network is responsible for creating and spreading fake news all over, which has moderators from Vietnam and the US. They are found using fake profile pictures that were generated by Artificial Intelligence to hide from fake detections from the Company.
Groups as “America Needs President Trump”, “Trump for America’s President,” and “WE STAND WITH TRUMP & PENCE!” etc were being operated from Vietnam by such actors. Further, it’s revealed to be having around 80 such groups.
The report from Graphika notes as, “Fake accounts served as the administrators of Facebook groups, increased the membership numbers of those groups, liked posts on the Pages, and posted large quantities of content from The BL-related assets. This structure constituted a large-scale artificial amplification factory whose only observable function was to boost content from The BL and, to a lesser extent, from the Epoch Times.”
Starting from here, all these fake profiles are said to be sharing positive content of Trump across other social platforms as YouTube and Twitter. Concerning this, Facebook acted by removing more than 900 accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, which are accused to be promoting Trump campaigns unlawfully to about 55 million users!
Source: Graphika
