The tech giant made clear, however, that there were no ties between such U.S. politicians and Russian actors seeking to use lawmakers’ comments to foment division ahead of November’s vote.
“We should expect to see Russian attempts to target election-related debates, particularly when they touch on support for Ukraine,” David Agranovich, a security policy director at Meta, told reporters Wednesday. The “trend is more about the subject, namely, countering support for Ukraine, than it is about any particular party.”
The Kremlin has grown increasingly sophisticated in targeting Western audiences with digital interference over the last decade, though its overall effect on how people vote remains unclear.
As tech companies, policymakers and civil society groups have become more successful at outing such campaigns, Russia-based groups — only some officially attributed to the Russian state — have shifted tactics to promote messages created by domestic politicians and influencers. Previously, they had attempted to generate divisive social media posts themselves.
During the recent Paris Olympic Games and the ongoing far-right unrest in the United Kingdom, for instance, Russia-affiliated social media accounts heavily promoted local social media users as examples of why Western democracy was in decline, based on POLITICO’s review of thousands of social media posts across Facebook, TikTok and X.
In its latest report, Meta said it had removed four Russia-based clandestine influence operations targeting social media users across Europe, the U.S. and countries like Azerbaijan and Mali, respectively. That included, collectively, 340 Facebook accounts and pages and Instagram accounts that had spent more than $150,000, in total, on social media advertising.