Facebook parent company Meta on Tuesday said that it had uncovered links between people associated with Chinese law enforcement and a long-running operation to positively influence people on social media about China.
The operation originated in China and its targets included Taiwan, the US, Australia, Britain, Japan and global Chinese-speaking audiences, Meta said.
“We assess that it’s the largest, though unsuccessful, and most prolific covert influence operation that we know of in the world today,” Meta global threat intelligence head Ben Nimmo said. “And we’ve been able to link Spamouflage to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement.”
Photo: Reuters
The social media giant removed about 7,700 Facebook accounts and hundreds of other pages, groups and Instagram accounts connected to the so-called “Spamouflage” campaign, elements of which have been active since 2018, it said in a quarterly security report.
The “Spamouflage” network has engaged in spurts of activity over the past several years pushing positive narratives about China and negative commentary about the US, Western foreign policies and critics of the Chinese government.
With the latest activity detected, Meta executives said they believed that “Spamouflage” had become the largest known cross-platform influence operation to date, with a presence on at least 50 services.
Clusters of the campaign’s fake accounts were run from different parts of China, but shared digital infrastructure and appeared to operate with clear shift patterns, including breaks for lunch and dinner on Beijing time, Meta said.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it was not aware of the findings, but added that individuals and institutions have often launched campaigns against China on social media platforms.
“We hope that the relevant company adheres to the principle of objectivity and impartiality, and avoids double standards,” ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) told a news briefing yesterday.
Hopefully, Meta would “truly identify what lies and rumors are, what is the truth, and effectively eliminate false information related to China,” Wang added.
The Spamouflage network first started posting on large platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, now called X, Meta said.
More recent activity showed it had expanded its footprint to include smaller platforms such as Medium, Reddit, Quora and Vimeo as well, it said.
It amassed a following of about 560,000 accounts for its pages on Facebook, but Meta executives said they believed most of the accounts were fake and had been purchased from commercial spam operators.
They said they saw little evidence of a genuine audience or engagement beyond that.
“This operation was large and noisy, but it struggled to reach beyond its own fake echo chamber,” Nimmo said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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