Disappearing ink, fake polls and voter fraud: EU fears as Russian propaganda ads target Euro elections
T he stories are doom-laden, laced with vitriolic sneers about Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ursula von der Leyen. Ukrainians are “ready to depose” their leader, Macron is breaking French “rules” with aid to Ukraine, an “uncontrolled influx” from the east is “seriously harming the Germans”.
According to new research, these are just a few examples of a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign washing over Facebook accounts of French and German citizens, before the European parliament elections next month.
The adverts – collected by tech expert Paul Bouchaud and shared with the Observer – all ran on Facebook during the first 13 days of May. None were labelled as political advertising, according to Bouchaud, who sees that as a clear breach of Meta’s rules and a possible breach of EU law. In April, the EU executive opened an investigation into Meta over suspicions that it was failing to prevent the dissemination of deceptive ads and disinformation.
Bouchaud, a PhD researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, thinks that the ads reveal a “systemic failure” at Meta. In an earlier report for AI Forensics, Bouchaud found that the pro-Russian propaganda ads had reached 38m individual accounts in France and Germany between August 2023 and March 2024, with most going undetected. Fewer than 5% of undeclared political ads shown on Facebook in 16 European countries were caught by Meta’s detection system, according to AI Forensics.
