Meta disrupted a France and Spain-based Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) network targeting France, Mali, Chad, DRC, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire. This file contains a network summary from Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report H2 2026.
We disrupted a Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior network originating in France and Spain and targeting audiences in France, Mali, Chad, DRC, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire. We removed 8 Facebook accounts, 24 Pages and 6 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior. About 184,200 accounts followed one or more of these Pages, and about 5,400 accounts followed one or more of these Instagram accounts. Through these enforcement actions, we determined that network operators engaged in around $21,400 in spending for ads, paid for mostly in US Dollars, on Facebook and Instagram to amplify their content. Meta’s investigation revealed links to foreign freelancers, likely working on behalf of Russian individuals to obfuscate the network’s origin.
The actors behind this operation used fake profiles, some of which appear to have been procured from account farms, to admin pages, place ads, and generate content. The operation demonstrated an ability to adapt to enforcement actions; in an attempt to avoid our political advertising policies, it ran non-civic patriotic advertisements to build authentic audiences, then organically seeding political content into their feeds. To execute their campaign, operators used inauthentic profiles to administer a collection of local-branded Pages featuring regional nuance, and coordinated across multiple cells, even sharing ad creatives concurrently with other known Russian operations. We observed that network operators consistently produced and amplified narratives supporting Russian political interests, including anti-Ukraine sentiment in France and the promotion of military-technical collaboration between Moscow and the Sahel region.
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No IOCs associated with this report.