<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/21/percepto-africa-france-russia-disinformation/>
"When Israeli businessmen Royi Burstien and Lior Chorev touched down in the
busy capital of the West African nation of Burkina Faso, they had an urgent
message for the country’s embattled ruler.
The Israelis — one a veteran political operative and the other a former army
intelligence officer — had been hired with the mission of keeping the
government of President Roch Marc Kaboré in power. Their company, Percepto
International, was a pioneer in what’s known as the disinformation-for-hire
business. They were skilled in deceptive tricks of social media, reeling people
into an online world comprised of fake journalists, news outlets and everyday
citizens whose posts were intended to bolster support for Kaboré’s government
and undercut its critics.
But as Percepto began to survey the online landscape across Burkina Faso and
the surrounding French-speaking Sahel region of Africa in 2021, they quickly
saw that the local political adversaries and Islamic extremists they had been
hired to combat were not Kaboré’s biggest adversary. The real threat, they
concluded, came from Russia, which was running what appeared to be a
wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Burkina Faso and
other democratically-elected governments on its borders.
Pro-Russian fake news sites populated YouTube and pro-Russian groups abounded
on Facebook. Local influencers used WhatsApp and Telegram groups to organize
pro-Russian demonstrations and praise Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Facebook fan pages even hailed the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary
network run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the late one-time Putin ally whose Internet
Research Agency launched a disinformation campaign in the United States to
influence the 2016 presidential election."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 33 Issue 93:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33/93#subj4
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
