Last February, when researchers at London-based nonprofit Reset found that Meta was allowing Ilan Shor, a Moldovan oligarch with links to the Kremlin, to run an ad campaign on Facebook, the company promised to stop him. But Shor, whom the United States sanctioned for illegally financing political parties in Moldova and pushing Russian disinformation, wasn’t finished.
Just months after Meta said it would stop Shor’s ads, according to new research from Reset shared exclusively with WIRED, Shor and his eponymous Shor Party had spun up an even more elaborate advertising campaign on Facebook that aimed to destabilize Moldova’s local elections in November and undermine Moldova’s entry to the European Union.
Over six months, the campaign used more than 100 fake Facebook pages to run hundreds of ads that amassed 155 million impressions and earned Meta at least $200,000 in revenue, according to Reset’s research. Several of the ads even featured deepfake videos of Moldova’s pro-Western president, Maia Sandu, wearing a hijab and announcing her intention to resign.
Despite multiple clear signals of a coordinated campaign by an individual who was banned from advertising on the platform, Meta’s automated and human systems failed to track and remove the campaign. For Reset, uncovering the Shor campaign was trivial.
“The way that I found the second campaign is simply I typed the name ‘Ilan Shor’ into Facebook’s ad archive,” a researcher at Reset, who did not want to be identified to protect their privacy, tells WIRED.
Ads posted by Shor’s group were active on Tuesday afternoon, according to a WIRED review of the Facebook Ad Library. As of Wednesday morning, after WIRED reached out to Meta, many of the ads were marked “inactive.”
Meta’s failure to identify a coordinated ad campaign featuring dozens of inauthentic pages, deepfake videos, and pro-Russian disinformation run by a sanctioned individual who had previously been reported for running a similar campaign reinforces criticisms that Meta does not invest enough resources in moderating content in non-English-speaking markets. Given that billions of people across the globe will be voting in some of the most consequential elections in recent memory—including presidential elections in the US and Moldova—it raises serious concerns about how Facebook could be weaponized to disrupt those elections, critics say.
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