As part of the activity, for instance, these fraudulent accounts — many of which used the same naming structure as part of the profile usernames — bought Facebook ads to promote the Russian propaganda to an online audience. They often linked to the pro-Kremlin articles in the spoofed media websites and posted repeatedly on each other’s Facebook feeds in an effort to garner engagement from the wider online world. None of this promotion garnered the attention of anyone outside the clandestine network.

Initially, the activity was divided evenly between all the European countries. But as the network expanded, the covert campaign redirected much of its efforts toward Germany, based on Meta’s analysis. Researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks online misinformation and independently reviewed Meta’s analysis before publication, found posts criticizing Berlin’s move away from Russian natural gas and warning Germans of a likely energy crisis because of their government’s new energy policies.

The posts however received little to no interaction with legitimate social media users. In part, that was because the Russian-affiliated accounts often had language discrepancies that outed them as non-native German speakers. Others also posted repeatedly in Russian, including links to Russian food recipes, while some made basic mistakes like using a male profile image for an account associated with a woman.

“This was a clear cut case of inauthentic activity. It ticked all the boxes,” said Nika Aleksejeva, lead researcher for the Baltics at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who initially discovered this covert network in August.