(San Francisco) Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it has removed thousands of accounts from the social network that are part of a major Chinese propaganda operation online.
The campaign was active on more than fifty platforms and forums, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter (renamed X), according to a report published by Meta.
“We consider this to be the largest – albeit ineffective – and prolific influence operation we have seen to date,” said the head of the US giant’s global threat intelligence division. , Ben Nimmo.
Meta teams were “able to trace people associated with Chinese law enforcement,” he said.
More than 7,700 Facebook accounts and about 15 Instagram accounts are affected, making it the largest account removal action, Meta said.
The group’s security teams were able to determine that the accounts were linked to a series of spam activities (unsolicited messages) that had occurred since 2019 and were stopped by Meta.
“For the first time, we were able to link these series and confirm that they are part of the same operation,” added Mr. Nimmo.
The updated network regularly posted positive comments about China and the province of Xinjiang, where the Uyghur minority is located, while criticizing the United States, the foreign policies of Western countries, and those criticizing the Chinese government “including journalists and researchers,” according to the report.
The network was based in China and targeted Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Japan in particular, as well as the Chinese-speaking audience abroad.
The affected accounts and pages were removed for breaching the group’s platform terms of service, but appeared to have little audience, with comments mostly pointing to false allegations.
The accounts were linked to different locations in China, with a pace of activity that seemed to correspond to office hours.
The operation also relied heavily on Medium, Reddit, X, YouTube, Soundcloud and Vimeo, according to Meta’s threat team.
Some of the tactics employed were otherwise similar to those of an updated Russian network in 2019, seeming to underscore that these operations learn from each other, according to Ben Nimmo.
Meta’s report also carried out an analysis of a campaign called “Doppelgänger”, discovered a year ago by its teams.
The heart of the operation was to make copies, “doppelgänger” in English, of major media websites in Europe to publish fake news about the war in Ukraine and then distribute it online, explained the head of the Meta Security Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.
The companies involved in this campaign, which initially mainly targeted Germany, France and Ukraine, before the United States and Israel, were recently sanctioned by the European Union.
“We were able to block their operational resources on our platforms, but the sites continue to be active,” Mr. Gleicher alerted.
This is, according to him, the largest and most advanced influence operation by Russia since 2017.
