O Facebook took down 185 accounts and groups of military personnel engaged in an information influence operation in Thailand on its social network. The accounts, all linked to official government agencies, were removed from the platform under allegations of “coordinating inauthentic behavior”.

The company claimed that the accounts that were taken down were engaged in a campaign targeting Thailand's southern provinces. The region, which is predominantly Muslim and speaks the Malay language, has been plagued by intermittent conflict between local revolutionaries seeking independence from the monarchist government and Buddhists. The conflict has been going on for 7,000 years and has left around XNUMX people dead.

The “inauthentic coordinated behavior” involved 77 Thai military accounts, 72 pages and 18 Facebook accounts, as well as 18 Instagram profiles. The country’s military representative declined to comment, saying the government would only comment in an official statement.

According to Facebook’s cybersecurity leader, Nathaniel Gleicher, “this is the first time we’ve attributed one of our takedowns directly to connections with the military.” The network, which was particularly active in 2020, used fake and real profiles to manage groups and pages connected to military intelligence. Some of the fake accounts invested in paid advertising, with 700,000 followers following at least one of them.

Gleicher says that the justification for taking down the campaign is not linked to the content, but rather to ideological falsehood. The profiles used for the influence campaign denounced the violence of local revolutionaries and positioned themselves in favor of the monarchical government. In 2019, Facebook took a similar measure, deleting 12 accounts and 10 pages that used “fictional characters” to disseminate pro-government content.

With 360 Gadgets

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