Prominent journalists report clones of their Facebook pages that are difficult to take down

A clone of writer, journalist, soldier Vakhtang Kipiani's Facebook page has been created using the profile photo and name from his original page with an obscene word added to it.

Kipiani reported this on Facebook.

"Since this person preemptively blocked me, I wouldn't have known about it. But my friend saw this page. Filed a complaint. And the company which preaches 'rules and order above all else' promised to look into it. Long story short: 'We have checked the profile your friend complained about and found that it was not impersonating you and did not violate our Community Standards,” Kipiani wrote.

Kipiani refused to share the details of this story in his comment to the IMI.

However, in the comments under his post, the Lviv Media Forum creative director Otar Dovzhenko said that a similar thing had happened to him.

Otar Dovzhenko told an IMI representative that a user named Andriy with a photo of a dog as his profile picture insulted him in the comments under one of his friends' post.

"I replied with some ironic remark about his photo, and he then changed the profile picture to a photo of me, taken from another page (it was a photo from some event). I filed several complaints, but Facebook replied that it did not confirm that my photo was used or that impersonation was happening. Then several people texted me saying that this account was writing pro-Russian troll comments under various posts," said Otar Dovzhenko.

According to him, his friends also complained about that account, but it yielded no result.

In the end, Otar contacted a lawyer, CEDEM deputy director Ihor Rozkladay (CEDEM being a trusted partner of Meta).

"He used his superpowers and nuked this account," Dovzhenko said.

In the comment to the IMI, Ihor Rozkladay explained that he gets such clones of public figures' pages taken down through escalation.

"I file a complaint and describe the situation, mentioning the real person and providing a link proving that it is a clone, explaining why it is not a real person. These pages usually get suspended. Although I myself received a refusal regarding a community page parasitizing on the name of a Suspilne branch as recently as earlier today," noted Ihor Rozkladay.

According to him, this helped take down multiple fake profiles of the former UAF Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny, cheairs of regional military administrations, and journalist Otar Dovzhenko.

"In Zaluzhny's case there was an obvious Russian trace. As for the rest, the intentions can range from disinformation to ordinary fraud and extortion," said Rozkladay.

In 2022, Ulyana Suprun, the acting Minister of Health of Ukraine (2016-2019) reported that someone had created a fake profile using her name and photo. She filed a complaint to Meta, but was told that the page did not violate Community Standards.

"It is my image, my name, and someone else is using them, and Mark Zuckerberg thinks it isn't a violation of their standards," Suprun said.