"In July and August 2022, Twitter and Meta removed two overlapping sets of accounts for violating their platforms’ terms of service," the researchers said on Wednesday in a report. "These [accounts’] campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran."
The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the alleged deaths of civilians and other purported atrocities in Ukraine, the report said. The cover campaigns took place over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation, according to the report.
Neither Twitter nor Meta - which runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - publicly attributed the activity to any entity or organization, the report also said.
However, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from US government-funded media outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, as well as linking to websites sponsored by the US military, the report added.
Twitter and Meta took the sets of accounts down for "platform manipulation and spam" and "coordinated inauthentic behavior" respectively, the report said.
*Meta is a company banned in Russia