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MANILA, Philippines – Facebook has shut down more than 100 tracked fake accounts of police and military units in the Philippines for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB), according to Nathaniel Gleicher, the social media giant’s head of cybersecurity policy.
At an online press conference Tuesday night, Gleicher said that most of the content on the fake accounts, which were run by people affiliated with various law enforcement and military agencies, revolved around criticism of the opposition, activism and communism.
Gleicher said the national network consisted of about 57 Facebook accounts, 31 pages, and 20 Instagram accounts. The sites had more than 276,000 followers on Facebook and 55,000 on Instagram.
The network has been more active, he noted, since 2019 when discussions about the Anti-Terrorism Law were at their peak.
“They posted mainly in Filipino and English on local news and events, including domestic politics, military activity against terrorism, draft of the pending anti-terrorism bill, criticism of communism, youth activists and the opposition, criticism of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing, the New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, ”Gleicher said.
“We are attributing this network to the Philippine army and police. In particular, we found links between, behind this network connected to both organizations and people associated with those organizations ”, he added.
The Philippines-based operation, the second of two alleged networks involved in CIB, aimed to engage Filipinos in the Southeast Asian region.
The first network, Gleicher said, dates back to a group of people in China’s Fujian province.
Posts from the China fake accounts group focused on issues about the Western Philippine Sea and Beijing’s interests and supported President Rodrigo Duterte and the possible 2022 presidential candidacy of his daughter, Davao Mayor Sara Duterte- Carpio.
But unlike the China-based network, Gleicher said the local network’s investigation was prompted by concerns raised by civil society groups here and the embattled Rappler media site.
Gleicher did not specify who complained, but in June 2020, the rights organization Karapatan urged Facebook and the Human Rights Commission to investigate red labels and the spread of fake accounts on social media.
There are also several reports of Facebook pages run by police members of the red-labeled progressive bloc in the House of Representatives.
Gleicher did not give details about the users of the fake accounts.
But he said: “Here too, we saw various groups of connected activities, all of which relied on fake accounts to evade the app, that is, to hide in the hope that we wouldn’t catch them, to post content, comment and manage pages” .
This is not the first time that a local network of fake accounts has engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior, or the synchronized use of fake Facebook accounts to drive a certain agenda.
But it was the first time that Facebook pointed the finger at government institutions, the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, such as those behind the fake accounts.
In March 2019, Gleicher also revealed that more than 200 Facebook accounts belonging to a network managed by Nic Gabunada were closed.
Gabunada was Duterte’s social media strategist during the 2016 presidential election. He also previously worked for then-President Benigno Aquino III’s camp and broadcast giant ABS-CBN.
Despite the similarities, Gleicher said no technical connection was observed between the Gabunada network and the one operated by the police and the military.
“We do not see clear links between this and the previous networks that we have eliminated. Now I must be clear, what we would see would be technical links on our platform. So we don’t see technical links on our platforms, ”he said.
“I am always aware that someone could be coordinating or participating outside of our platforms in a way that we would not see, but if we saw technical links, we would let them know,” he added.
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Gleicher said that Facebook would still have to inform the Philippine government on the matter, but assured that the social platform would be working with local officials, as it did in the United States.
He also promised that more details on the report would be released later, with samples of the posts from both the local account group and China.
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