New research has uncovered a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign on Facebook targeting French and German citizens ahead of next month's European parliament elections. The ads, collected by tech expert Paul Bouchaud, all ran during the first 13 days of May but were not labelled as political advertising, in what he sees as a clear breach of Meta's rules and a possible breach of EU law.
Bouchaud, a PhD researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, believes the ads reveal a 'systemic failure' at Meta. An earlier report for AI Forensics found that pro-Russian propaganda ads had reached 38 million individual accounts in France and Germany between August 2023 and March 2024, with fewer than 5% of undeclared political ads caught by Meta's detection system across 16 European countries.
Meta said it welcomed research into 'inauthentic activity' but rejected claims that no action had been taken, stating that a sample of the ads showed its security team had already blocked them and disabled the pages. Bouchaud countered that it is technically feasible to detect coordinated propaganda networks in real time and accused Meta of 'a lack of willingness'.
The disinformation campaign is part of a broader foreign interference threat facing European democracies. Nathalie Loiseau, a French MEP who chairs the European parliament's subcommittee on security and defence, said Russia has been investing for decades in interference, including information manipulation. 'The scale of the threat is very high,' she warned, noting that it is 'not science fiction, it is already here'.
Loiseau cited the 2023 Slovak elections, where a pro-European candidate lost after a fake audio emerged purporting to show him discussing how to rig an election. Katarína Klingová of the Globsec thinktank said that while the exact impact is unknown, the fake audio played into pre-existing narratives, as a poll had found 53% of Slovak citizens expected the election to be rigged.
