Social Media Manipulation 2021/2022: Assessing the Ability of Social Media Companies to Combat Platform Manipulation
Social Media Manipulation 2021/2022: Assessing the Ability of Social Media Companies to Combat Platform Manipulation

Author(s): Sebastian Bay, Rolf Fredheim, Tetiana Haiduchyk, Anton Dek
Subject(s): Media studies, Security and defense, Politics and communication, Social Informatics, ICT Information and Communications Technologies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Russian Aggression against Ukraine
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: Social media manipulation; VKontakte; Fake accounts; Ukraine; Russia; TikTok; Facebook; Twitter; Removing inauthentic accounts; Transparency of actions;
Summary/Abstract: The ongoing war in Ukraine has shown the importance of being able to defend and influence the information environment in order to win a modern conflict. Coordinated social media manipulation campaigns continue to be an important tool for adversaries. Therefore, assessing the abilities of social media companies to protect their platforms against manipulation continues to be important for understanding how well our societies are able to protect our information environment against antagonistic threats. To further our understanding of platform manipulation, we re-ran our groundbreaking experiment to assess the ability of social media companies to counter platform manipulation. This year, we added a sixth social media platform, VKontakte, to our experiment. To test the ability of social media companies to identify and remove manipulation, we bought inauthentic engagement on 46 posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and VKontakte (“the platforms”), using three high-quality Russian social media manipulation service providers.

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