Tech Roundup: Russia targeted Brazilians with vaccine misinformation

This week’s topics: Russia spread fake news about Covid vaccines among Brazilians. E-commerce in Brazil has its best-ever first semester. Brazilian regulator assembles national data privacy council. 

Russian operation targeted Brazil to spread fake news about Covid vaccines

Facebook announced this week that it took down a network that spread fake content regarding Covid-19 vaccines on social media and other platforms. The network was operating from Russia and targeting, among other regions, Latin American countries, including Brazil.   

Why it matters. Fake news is a big problem in Brazil. For instance, back in March, non-profit news organizations revealed that the government paid digital influencers to tout unproven treatments against the coronavirus. In recent months, social media platforms began increasing scrutiny of President Jair Bolsonaro’s posts and of channels owned by his supporters. 

The network. In a report, the company stated that it had removed 65 Facebook accounts and another 243 on Instagram for violating its policy against foreign interference. The network operated across a dozen platforms and targeted audiences primarily in India and Latin America, and to a lesser extent in the United States. 

• Facebook’s investigation found a link between the campaign and a subsidiary of the digital marketing agency, Fazze, whose operations were conducted from Russia. The company was banned from social media.
• According to the report, “this campaign functioned as a disinformation laundromat. It created misleading articles and petitions on multiple forums (…) then used fake accounts on social media, including Facebook and Instagram, to seed and amplify this off-platform content, using crude spammy tactics.”
• The operation also used influencers to post content and use certain hashtags in a cash-for-content scam. In a BBC article, the Brazilian youtuber Everson Zoio was identified as one of the influencers who might have taken up the offer.

Stages. The campaign had two phases, with a five months break of activity in between, in which fake content was created concerning the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines. 

• In the first, which began at the end of 2020, the network posted comments and memes falsely accusing the AstraZeneca immunizer of turning people into chimpanzees.
• The posts were published with several hashtags, two of them in Portuguese (#AstraZenecamata...