The IRA spent extensive amounts of effort trying to hire real, unwitting locals to involve in its 2015-2017 operation. Then, in 2019, our team at SIO saw Prigozhin’s other entities executing this strategy in Africa... https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1300865859955691521">https://twitter.com/justinhen...

We used the phrase “franchising” - they were hiring locals, both culturally and linguistically fluent - and also, real people - to run front media operations. FB took down the network. But what happened next was interesting... https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/prigozhin-africa">https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/p...

Prigozhin’s other media properties wrote stories claiming that FB (and SIO) were censoring the voices of real African people out of some kind of misguided Russophobia.

The real, ideologically aligned ppl involved -we don’t know how wittingly- claimed they were unfairly silenced

Since they aren’t “inauthentic” in the sockpuppet persona sense of the word this is a tougher claim for the platform to unravel.

This operation was a hybrid: real and fake. Here’s Graphika’s excellent report on it: https://graphika.com/reports/ira-again-unlucky-thirteen/">https://graphika.com/reports/i...