A year ahead of the US presidential election, the world’s biggest social media companies are still failing to tackle manipulation on their platforms, an exercise by NATO StratCom has found.



To test the ability of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to detect potentially malicious activity, researchers at the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence ran a four-month experiment starting in May.

They purchased social media engagement on 105 different posts across the four social media platforms from manipulation service providers (MSPs), a type of company that allow clients to buy clicks and inflate their social media presence.

At a cost of just 300 euros (about $333), NATO StratCom bought 3,530 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views and 5,100 followers across the four platforms.

Researchers were able to identify the accounts — 18,739 in total — that were being used to deliver the purchased interactions. This in turn allowed them to assess what other pages these inauthentic accounts were interacting with on behalf of other clients.

The results of the experiment are startling: Four weeks after the purchase, 4 in 5 of the purchased engagements were still online, and three weeks after a sample of fake accounts was reported to the companies, 95% of the accounts were still active.

The findings, which are contained in a report released today shared with a small number of media outlets including BuzzFeed News, suggest that malicious and inauthentic activity enabled by MSPs will often go unnoticed, considerably increasing the risk that attempts by ill-intentioned state and nongovernmental actors that seek to interfere in democratic processes will not be effectively detected and tackled.

“Social media manipulation is the new frontier for antagonists seeking to influence elections, polarise public opinion, and side-track legitimate political discussions,” the report states. The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence is a NATO-accredited international military organization. It is not part of the NATO Command Structure.

The vast majority of interactions driven by the inauthentic accounts identified by the researchers were commercial in nature and on pages for businesses and brands. But NATO StratCom observed the same accounts engage with 721 political pages, including 52 official government profiles and the accounts of two heads of state.

Experts are concerned that trends similar to those seen in Europe are present in the US election. Trevor Davis, a professor at George Washington University's Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, told BuzzFeed News that "accounts observed during the European parliamentary elections and identified as fraudulent have now been repurposed and relocated with the purpose of the 2020 US presidential elections, and specifically the democratic primaries."

Davis added: “This appears to not be on behalf of a particular campaign. The goal may be simply to sow distrust and division.”

Interactions, such as likes, were also noted by NATO StratCom analysts on the pages of leaders from major countries, political parties in the European Parliament, individual candidates competing at all levels in elections across Europe as well as on political pages in Russia, Ukraine, and India. The researchers also identified political accounts focussed on politics in Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Taiwan, and Tunisia, suggesting the use of MSPs is a global issue.

It is not known who is behind the interactions on these accounts. The owners of the pages being boosted could be paying MSPs for engagement themselves, but it could also be driven by supporters, or even opponents trying to smear a politician or political group.