Russia used Facebook: sources
SAN FRANCISCO: Russian intelligence agents tried to spy on President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign earlier this year by creating phony Facebook personas, according to a US congressman and two other people briefed on the effort.
About two dozen Facebook accounts were created to conduct surveillance on Macron campaign officials and others close to the centrist former financier as he sought to defeat farright nationalist Marine Le Pen and other opponents in the tworound election, the sources said. Macron won in a landslide in May.
Facebook said in April it had taken action against fake accounts that were spreading misinformation about the French election. However, the effort to infiltrate the social networks of Macron officials has not previously been reported.
Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in the French election by hacking and leaking emails and documents. US intelligence agencies told Reuters in May that hackers with connections to the Russian Government were involved, but they did not have conclusive evidence that the Kremlin ordered the hacking.
Facebook confirmed to Reuters it had detected spying accounts in France and deactivated them. It credited a combination of improved automated detection and steppedup human efforts to find sophisticated attacks.
Company officials briefed congressional committee members and staff, among others, about their findings. People involved in the conversations also said the number of Facebook accounts suspended in France for promoting propaganda or spam — much of it related to the election — had climbed to 70,000, a big jump from the 30,000 account closures the company disclosed in April.
Facebook did not dispute the figure.
Yesterday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the accusations that Russia had tried to influence the French election as ‘‘a lie and not true’’.
The spying campaign included Russian agents posing as friends of friends of Macron associates and trying to glean personal information from them, according to the US congressman and two others briefed on the matter. — Reuters