WIRED / Facebook

On March 7, Facebook announced a discovery. It had found 137 different accounts, Pages and Groups across Facebook and Instagram doing what it calls “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.

In other words: they were impostors, misleading people about their identity and agenda. A deception had been unmasked, and the 180,000 accounts who followed at least one of the members of this network could breathe a little easier.


In one sense, this announcement was a watershed moment. It was the first finding of such a network dedicated to targeting the UK. But in another, the only surprise was that it had taken this long to find. Similar networks doing similar forms of manipulation have been found in country after country, platform after platform around the world.

Most visible have been the networks found to be active in the United States during the 2016 election – but Oxford researchers have pointed to similar activity happening now in 48 countries around the world. We now know that it’s come to British shores too.

Read next How QAnon took hold in the UK How QAnon took hold in the UK

Examples released by Facebook show a network that sometimes masqueraded as individuals, sometimes as groups. Some of the content is similar to those Facebook uncovered in the US: alt-right, nationalist, angry, often hateful of minorities. There’s “Politicised”, a group with a big Union Jack sharing content about how gay Christians are bullied by other members of the LGBT community. Another is straight out of the alt-right handbook: “Being A leftist is easy!” it says, “if anyone disagrees with you, call them a racist!”.

Then it gets slightly weirder. The network’s puppeteers “operated fake accounts to engage in hate speech”, Facebook said. But one account was calling for the leader of UKIP to be charged with hate speech. Another fake group was called “Anti Far Right Extremists”. Another, “Halal Speech”. The network was coordinated, but coordinated to share information which was completely contradictory.


What this isn’t, really, fully, is what it’s been described by the BBC and other media outlets as: “fake news”. Some of content the network was pushing looks like news and some of it is certainly fake. But focusing on that completely misses the point of what was going on. The purpose of this network, why it existed, wasn’t to try to convince you and the rest of the UK of something you didn’t believe beforehand. The point wasn’t to replace one belief with another. Lying wasn’t the full picture. No, it was cleverer than that.

This network wasn’t trying to change your mind, it was trying to confirm it. To make you even surer that you are right, and make you angrier with the people who are wrong – the internet’s “leftards” or “racists” – than you were before. The messages were poles apart, and all of it was calculated to provoke exactly the same response: outrage. This strategy, a similar one to those uncovered on Twitter in the past, is all about inhabiting both ends of the political spectrum, and to pull them further and further, angrier and angrier apart.

The complicated truth about China's social credit system China The complicated truth about China's social credit system

Read next Inside Facebook’s new power grab Inside Facebook’s new power grab

This wasn’t about changing what people thought. It was about changing what people feel, and the issues themselves have always been whatever people are angriest about. We’ve seen online influence campaigns touch on almost everything on which societies profoundly disagree: police brutality, minority rights, gun rights, transgender issues, anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, online privacy concerns, and alleged government corruption. Wedge issues that inflame existing social tensions. It looks like this network’s main focus was hate speech, but it could have been any of these. This wasn’t fake news. This was a covert online influence operation.


Who’s behind it? Facebook isn’t saying, and in all likelihood it actually doesn’t know. Attribution, the actual identity of the people behind these networks, is something that we’re spectacularly ignorant about. Identity can be easily spoofed online: there are entire grey markets providing services to mask where and what you are. It’s nearly impossible for independent researchers to work out identity, and incredibly difficult even for the tech giants.

Given the strategy involved, my bet is that the people behind this network are those who would benefit from the UK becoming more divided, and that probably means a hostile state. But it could be almost anyone, because the barriers to entry to this kind of online influence operations are rock-bottom. Online communities, such as those from 4Chan and Reddit have done it for the Lulz; white supremacists have done it to gain profile; digital campaigners have done it to win elections. There are entire disinformation-on-demand marketplaces that anyone, even just normal individuals, can tap into.

The most interesting part of the story is that Facebook discovered it by accident. It, the BBC reports, basically stumbled over it whilst it was investigating hate speech about the UK home secretary, Sajid Javid. And that, in fact, is very often how it works.

Politicians and media exposure spur the tech giants into action. There are simply too many problems, too many people, too much data in too many languages for companies even the size of Facebook to be across all of them all at once. It focuses on the ones that are most embarrassing t it. It’s understandable – but also worrying.

Read next Islamic State terrorist propaganda is going viral on Facebook Islamic State terrorist propaganda is going viral on Facebook

137 accounts or groups sounds like a lot, and 180,000 sounds like a lot of people reached, but in the world of online influence these numbers are not just small, they’re embarrassingly small. I have met individual young clickbait merchants in Kosovo with easily larger digital presences than the network that Facebook has described. So, while this discovery is a first, it is a very, very small one.

The problem of online influence hasn’t gone away; in fact it’s only just arrived. Next time you feel that prickle of outrage building online, stop. Pause. And know that there are plenty of people online dedicated to making you feel that way.

More great stories from WIRED

– There's a surge in dodgy Facebook adverts about Brexit

– Inside the vulnerable fame of YouTube's child ASMR stars


– I tried to keep my baby secret from Facebook and Google

– How SoftBank became the most powerful company in tech