Meta removed 80 Facebook accounts, 26 Pages, nine Groups, and two Instagram accounts, violating Meta policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior, which were at the same time linked with the Strategic Communications Department of the Government of Georgia, the company said in a report.
Meta investigations claim the fake network actively operated to amplify support of the GD by sharing posts of government officials and pro-government media reports while at the same time criticizing opposition, particularly during the March protests against the Russia-style draft law to declare NGOs as “foreign agents”
“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to the Strategic Communications Department of the Government Administration of Georgia,” the Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report of Meta reads.
About $33,500 were spent on Facebook and Instagram for the advertisement of these fake, GD-linked accounts.
This is not the first time Meta removed GD-linked social media accounts: in 2019 Facebook deleted a total of 396 accounts, pages, and groups that were deemed government-linked. In 2022 social media accounts of the radical Alt-info group were also removed.
A number of credible reports have said the strategic communications departments in various ministries almost never target Russian disinformation and are mainly used against political opponents of the Georgian Dream, often replicating messages of Russian propaganda.
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