SPENDINGS ON META PLATFORM DURING JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 28, 2025
AUTHOR : ANDREI RUSU, WATCHDOG.MD
CO – AUTHORS : ANDREI CURĂRARU, CĂTĂLINA BUDURIN
Summary
Between January 31 to February 28, the Russian Federation, through its fugitive oligarchs, changed its strategy of sponsoring disinformation through Facebook and YouTube platforms. Fugitive Ilan Shor abandoned the sponsorship of ads through anonymous pages and those directly associated with him. Shor’s new tactic is to promote the image of politicians Victoria Furtuna, Vasile Tarlev and Irina Vlah, who were supported by the oligarch in the presidential elections. At the same time, Shor continues to actively promote, via Facebook, the TV station “MD24,” launched in Moscow in the context of the presidential elections, to manipulate public opinion. Veaceslav Platon continues to promote manipulative posts on his personal page and through former journalist Natalia Morari, with whom he has a child. Both Ilan Shor and Veaceslav Platon have significantly reduced their budgets for promoting posts aimed at manipulating public opinion. They have also shortened the duration of ad campaigns – from 7 days to 2-3 days or even a few hours. During the monitored period, we found that Ilan Shor considerably increased the number of advertisements compared to last year. At the same time, Veaceslav Platon reduced the number of sponsorships on Facebook. Also, on YouTube he stopped advertising once the presidential election campaign ended. In addition to the two oligarchs, former Prime Minister Vlad Filat has also started to promote various manipulative posts for a fee. Through sponsored posts, Filat launches attacks on the current government, the European Union, civil society and the independent press. After monitoring, it was found that the advertisements on Filat’s page are modeled after those on the page of Victoria Furtuna, a former anti-corruption prosecutor suspected by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of leaking information from investigations. In some cases, posts were promoted from both pages at the same time and with a similar budget, manipulating public opinion on the subject of USAID grants. All the ads analyzed had disclaimers for political and social issues. This allowed us to partially identify the investment in the ads placed on META. Transparency of these expenditures is only possible if the page follows META rules and uses the required disclaimer for political and social ads. Ads that run without a disclaimer disappear from the META Ads Library, and while they are running, the amount paid and the period for which they were sponsored are not publicly disclosed.