They harassed en masse on social media your targets, usually medici, politicians and journalists, bombarding them with thousands of comments and forcing them to delete their posts. They flanked them to swastikas through photomontages and called them “supporters of Nazism” for recommending anti-Covid vaccines. An action of digital squads, the so-called brigading, which led Facebook to cancel the no vax network called “V_V“, Consisting of a number of accounts between one thousand and two thousand. A close on security that Meta – the company that controls the social network – has undertaken in several countries, interfacing with governments, police and other technology companies.
The V_V movement originated in Italy and in France. In our country, an investigation by the prosecutors of Torino e Genoa the group has resulted in a series of searches in recent days. “The people behind this business have relied on a combination of authentic accounts, duplicates e fakes to comment en masse on the posts of pages, editorial realities and individuals in order to intimidate them and silence them “, they explain in a press release Nathaniel like e David Agranovich, at the head of the company’s security and threats divisions, respectively. “Our automated review systems have taken action against their comments and accounts, for various violations of ours community standard including hate speech, disinformation, incitement to violence, bullying and harassment “. In particular, the removed network in Italy – explains the company – was active in brigading, squadism, coordinating “to comment en masse, post en masse to harass other people “.
Era Telegram the platform used most to coordinate attacks. “Generally – they observe from Meta – the comments on the social networks of the members of the network included link to their channels Telegram, where the group it trained the users to circumvent controls and work together against their own goals, coordinating for attack en masse specific people and pages. These accounts, then, always poured into their target’s posts en masse to leave dozens, in some cases tens of thousands, of comments. In an attempt to circumvent content controls, they commented and did not post, altering the words or by using a coded language. And many of the accounts managed by each operator wrote the same identification number in their bio, probably to easily keep track of who was managing the activities within the network ”.
Even though the accounts were removed due to the brigading, Meta specifies, this does not mean that all the contents posted by V_V have been banned. “We continue to monitor the situation – concludes the company – and we will take measures if we detect further violations, to prevent abuses on our platform and protect the people who use our services “.