The social media company Reddit said Friday that it had detected a suspected Russian disinformation campaign on the site intended to spread confidential U.K. government documents ahead of next weeks election.
That comes after social media analytics firm Graphika suggested in a report earlier this week that Russian tactics played some role in the leak of the documents last month, which detailed U.S. and U.K. discussions leading up to Brexit.
The documents showed that U.S. officials wanted the U.K.s National Health Service to be “on the table” in any post-Brexit talks — a claim that bolstered an attack line by the opposition Labour Party and fed allegations that the Conservatives were putting the system up for sale.
In a statement outlining how it tied the latest campaign back to Russia, Reddit said it believes the post was connected to similar disinformation efforts that Facebook discovered earlier this year.
In an analysis of the earlier campaign, which Facebook took down in May, the Washington think-tank the Atlantic Council called the operation the “Secondary Infektion.”
“The operation was strongly reminiscent of the Soviet-era Operation Infektion that accused the United States of creating the AIDS virus,” according to an Atlantic Council blog post at the time. “The latest operation … used a similar technRead More – Source
