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Profiting from Propaganda:
How Meta Benefits from Pro-Kremlin Election Meddling Ads in Moldova
Download the full reportExecutive summary
An ongoing pro-Kremlin influence campaign has paid Meta up to 300,000 euros over 18 months in an attempt to influence Moldova’s presidential elections and EU referendum. It is Facebook’s most profitable ad campaign for the entire country, representing almost a quarter of the total political ad spend on the platform in Moldova since August 2020. This report investigates the scope and methods of this ad campaign.
The campaign started on the official page of the Moldovan politician and pro-Kremlin oligarch Ilan Shor to promote his party’s political agenda. After the U.S. government sanctioned him in October 2022 for ties to Russia, the ad campaign moved to a network of inauthentic pages with an unclear source of funding.
This analysis maps over 150 inauthentic Facebook pages activated to run ads spreading hate speech and disinformation, including deepfake videos of President Maia Sandu, to promote Shor’s pro-Kremlin political agenda. The inauthentic advertisers belong to a network with a size of up to 340,000 automatically generated pages.
Pages from the same network have also been used on other political and scam campaigns, including the ongoing Doppelganger campaign targeting EU audiences with pro-Kremlin propaganda. Our analysis shows Meta takes action only against some of the ads and some of the active advertisers, overlooking the broader network of latent pages on the platform.
Despite clear Terms of Service violations for content, misrepresentation of advertiser identity, and coordinated inauthentic behavior, Meta allowed most of the ads to run for the duration of their budget. At the time of this report’s publication, some of the pages we identified were still running ads promoting Shor’s agenda.
This campaign affects Moldova during a critical period of vulnerability to Russia’s aggression, showing how Meta is not devoting enough attention to election security in Eastern Europe as a whole.