Facebook has removed a network of accounts from its platform that it says targets Vietnamese activists who criticize the country’s government, an official at Facebook’s parent company Meta said on Wednesday.
In July, the company removed a Vietnamese Facebook group called “e47”, prompting its members to report posts they didn’t like to Facebook, in an effort to remove them.
The latest action was taken against a separate group, according to David Agranovich, Facebook’s head of global threat disruption.
“What we saw was a network of accounts in Vietnam that engaged in the coordinated targeting of such activists and others who publicly criticized the Vietnamese government,” Agranovic told Reuters.
Agranovich said of the network, attackers used Facebook accounts to submit “hundreds or thousands of reports” against their targets using Facebook’s built-in reporting tools, also in a report released by Facebook on Wednesday. . was elaborated.
“Many operators will use the fake accounts they use as their targets, and then they will report the target’s real account as an impersonated account,” he said.
According to Agranovich, some of the accounts were openly offering to remove other Facebook accounts as a commercial service.
“They essentially advertise this kind of abusive reporting service in their actual bios,” he said.
Unlike neighboring China, Facebook is not blocked in Vietnam, where it has about 70 million users and is the country’s main platform for e-commerce.
It has also become a main platform for political discontent, however, putting Facebook and the government in constant conflict over the removal of content deemed “anti-state”.
Vietnam’s foreign ministry, which handles government inquiries from foreign media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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