The Russian marketing agency Fazze made a splash with attempts to pay off European influencers to spread fake dirt about Western vaccines in an apparent bid to make Moscow’s COVID-19 jab seem more appealing.
The effort to buy their way into social media popularity in Europe may not have been Fazze’s only gambit, however. The Daily Beast found a similar attempt to seed the same talking points and content to American audiences—part of “a multi-phase operation that employed almost every trick in the book,” according to Jack Stubbs, director of the social media analytics firm Graphika.
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Blowing the whistle: Fazze didn’t have much to work with in terms of material to push the bogus claim that Pfizer’s vaccine was deadly so it had to use other tactics to make people pay attention to its propaganda. “There was a claimed hack-and-leak, the use of pay-to-publish pseudo news sites, fake personas on Facebook targeting US Covid groups, and an attempt to co-opt influencers on YouTube and Twitter,” Jack Stubbs, director of investigations at the social media analytics firm Graphika told The Daily Beast.
Representatives for Fazze did not respond to questions from The Daily Beast.
Russia’s role in the disinformation campaign first became public thanks to a French YouTuber, Léo Grasset. In May, Grasset received an offer from Fazze offering him money if he would hype a false claim about supposedly high death rates from Pfizer vaccines. The YouTuber went public with the strange offer, prompting a handful of other influencers to come forward with similar offers.
When it first reached out to European influencers, Fazze representatives asked them to cite a chart purportedly taken from an internal AstraZeneca document to make the false argument that recipients that the Pfizer vaccine died more often than those dosed with AstraZeneca’s shot. In support of the talking point, Fazze shared a handful of links to articles hosted at spammy, commodity “news” sites containing the chart and supportive talking points.
While Fazze pushed those links to influencers, a network of India-based Facebook accounts began spamming the comments sections of American health and news Facebook pages with the same talking points, chart, and websites Fazze had asked influencers to share. Trolls flagged their anti-Prizer propaganda with comments feigning shock and surprise. “I was horrified when I read the article about the number of deaths from the Pfizer vaccine.” one read. Another noted, “I advise you to read it before you decide to vakinize with it,” suggesting a non-native English speaker’s misspelling of “vaccinate.”
The Daily Beast shared its findings with Facebook and the company’s security team confirmed that it was aware of the activity and has been actively investigating as part of ongoing counter information operation efforts.
In with the olds: Some of the accounts appeared to target audiences in the U.S. where vaccine skepticism has been high, including a news page for The Villages, a popular retirement community in Florida, and a COVID-19 news page for an NBC affiliate in Mississippi, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States. Other posts targeted generic healthcare-focused Facebook pages in New York, Oklahoma, New Jersey.
In order to make their propaganda more salacious and newsy, the trolls tried to adopt the mantle of hackers and a known Russian government-linked disinformation crew.
Articles and posts pushed by the trolls featured cartoonish and stereotypical language imitating a Russian-speaker writing in broken English. “Hacker is just like a friendly neighbor, a Spiderman in the world wide web,” one article proclaimed, while a troll persona on Facebook posted links to the chart as “data leaked by the hackers.”
But there’s no evidence that the documents were the result of a breach. Rather, a Russian news outlet which received a copy of the full AstraZeneca document from which Fazze’s chart came reported that the pharmaceutical company had shared the document with regulators in the European Union and Russia. In other words, no hack.
Fake out: It wasn’t the only head fake. At times, the trolls seemed to be trying to hint that they were linked to a well-known Russian government-linked disinformation effort.
“Parts of this activity, particularly the use of one-time burner accounts to post documents on a collection of sites including Reddit and Medium, resembled tactics associated with a suspected Russian operation known as Secondary Infektion,” Stubbs explained. Secondary Infektion operators were linked to one of the more notorious efforts to meddle in Britain’s December 2019 elections with the publication of controversial leaked documents from the country’s National Health Service.
Despite the similar behavioral tics, there’s no evidence linking the Fazze vaccine disinformation to the notorious Russian disinformation group.
“This campaign shows how low the barrier to entry has fallen for marketing firms planning to engage in online influence operations,” Stubbs says. “The actors were quickly exposed and easily caught, but they were also able to make a sustained and concerted effort to seed a misleading narrative online, with some limited successes.”
