Evidence of Russia-Linked Influence Operations in Africa
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
Russia’s global strategy for reasserting itself as a geopolitical superpower has led to an increased presence in Africa, where it has broadened efforts to shape the continent’s politics and pursue new economic opportunities to allay the effects of sanctions. While the presence of Russian military instructors and paramilitary groups in Libya and the Central African Republic is well documented, there is emerging evidence that Russian-linked companies are now active in the information space as well. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the oligarch perhaps best known for running the Internet Research Agency, is central to this expansion.
In this post we identify a Facebook operation attributed to entities tied to Prigozhin – including, it appears, the Wagner Group, a Russian organization that has served as a private military contractor in several African countries. The first allusion to a social media influence operation tied to Prigozhin stemmed from Daily Beast reporting and a document shared with us by the Dossier Center that suggested the existence of a cluster of Facebook Pages tied to the Wagner Group. We identified an initial cluster of Pages which targeted Libya, and shared the find with the Facebook Threat Intel team.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date modified | November 11, 2022 |
Publication date | November 11, 2022; October 29, 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Grossman, Shelby |
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Author | Bush, Daniel |
Author | DiResta, Renee |
Subjects
Subject | Russia |
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Subject | Africa |
Subject | information operation |
Genre | Text |
Genre | Report |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Grossman, S., Bush, D., and DiResta, R. (2022). Evidence of Russia-Linked Influence Operations in Africa. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/yh993mk2487. https://doi.org/10.25740/yh993mk2487.
Collection
Stanford Internet Observatory, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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