Facebook struggles as Russia steps up presence in unstable west Africa

Facebook is struggling to contain pro-Russian and anti-western posts that are contributing to political instability in west Africa, investigators and analysts have said.

The platform, which has expanded rapidly across the continent in recent years, has made significant investment in content moderation, but still faces enormous challenges in curbing deliberate disinformation campaigns. One major area of concern is the strategically important Sahel region, which has suffered a series of military takeovers over the last 18 months.

The US and others have alleged that Wagner is funded by the powerful businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is closely linked to Vladimir Putin. It has a growing presence in Africa and its mercenaries have been deployed in Mozambique, Sudan, Libya and in Central African Republic, where Wagner group fighters committed human rights abuses while fighting alongside government forces against rebels, according to a group of independent UN experts. Prigozhin and the Kremlin have denied any knowledge of Wagner.

The DFR Lab identified a coordinated network of five pages pushing narratives that promoted Russian intervention in Mali while disparaging the west, and France in particular. The pages have published nearly 24,000 posts and are followed by more than 140,000 accounts.

In September 2021, the pages of the network began promoting Wagner as an alternative to the French forces. Pages in the network frequently posted identical content, often less than 20 seconds apart, the DFR Lab found.

Independent fact-checkers labelled several posts as misleading, including a pro-Russian page that repurposed images of apparently well-equipped hobbyists in combat gear as Russian soldiers.

The DFRLab has an ongoing partnership with Facebook to independently monitor the platform for disinformation campaigns, with a particular emphasis on election interference, and receives funding from Meta.

Toussaint Nothias, research director at the Digital Civil Society Lab of Stanford University, who has worked extensively on Facebook, said the decision was surprising and underlined the big challenge of effective content moderation.

In October 2019, Facebook took down three networks of accounts linked to Prigozhin. The accounts were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics in eight countries: Madagascar, the CAR, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya.

In 2020, Facebook targeted a second Russian-led network of professional trolls outsourced to Ghanaian and Nigerian operatives.