“Meta caught an Israeli marketing firm running hundreds of fake Facebook accounts”
In all, Meta’s researchers uncovered 510 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one group that were tied to the effort, including fake and previously hacked accounts. The accounts posed as “Jewish students, African Americans and ‘concerned’ citizens” and shared posts that praised Israel’s military actions and criticized the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and college protests. They also shared Islamaophobic comments in Canada, saying that “radical Islam poses a threat to liberal values in Canada.”
Meta’s researchers said the campaign was linked to STOIC, a “a political marketing and business intelligence firm” based in Israel, though they didn’t speculate on the motives behind it. STOIC was also active on X and YouTube and ran websites “focused on the Israel-Hamas war and Middle Eastern politics.”
According to Meta, the campaign was discovered before it could build up a large audience and many of the fake accounts were disabled by the company’s automated systems. The accounts reached about 500 followers on Facebook and about 2,000 on Instagram.
As taken from a May 29 article published by engadget.com. The full report from Meta (formely known as Facebook) was published under their May 2024 First Quarter “Adversarial Threat Report”, page 10. This sounds consistent with what was last covered by Haaretz, “The pro-Israeli influence network”.