Meta recently shared new threat research involving mass disinformation campaigns coming from China and Russia. The tech giant removed accounts and pages across all its platforms related to what it referred to as “the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world.”
The Chinese operation
On the Chinese side of things, Meta discovered a network of threat actors targeting over 50 apps, including TikTok, Reddit, X, Pinterest, and Meta-owned apps, among many others. Investigators were able to tie this sort of suspicious activity together for the first time. Linking it to people associated with Chinese law enforcement carrying out an activity known as Spamouflage, which violated Meta’s policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Spamouflage was first noted in 2019, targeting the Hong Kong protests. It used a social media amplification network that criticized protesters and praised Hong Kong police and the Chinese state.
For this recent Spamouflage campaign, Meta revealed in its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report it removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups, and 15 Instagram accounts connected with the network. It targeted regions like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, and global Chinese-speaking audiences. Content posted by the network included criticism of the US, Western foreign policies, and any high-profile critics of China, as well as positive commentary about China. Fortunately, Meta’s research found the network’s reach wasn’t very successful outside the realm of other spam accounts. It found these pages and groups’ followers were primarily spam accounts from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Brazil, which were not target territories.
Russian influence
Meanwhile, it blocked thousands of malicious domains, accounts, and pages related to the Russian operation known as Doppelganger. As part of this operation, threat actors create websites, Facebook pages, and social media accounts purporting to be genuine government outlets and mainstream news outlets sharing fake news articles that attempt to weaken support for Ukraine. Meta said that while it first targeted France, Germany, and Ukraine, the campaign has since expanded to include the US and Israel.
Just the beginning
While it’s heartening that social media companies are beginning to spot and weed out these kinds of campaigns following years of speculation about the spread of fake news and disinformation online, experts believe this is likely just the beginning of China’s attempt at covert influence operations online. Sandra Quincoses, an intelligence analyst at cybersecurity firm Nisos, told Time that the spread may be slow initially due to Chinese Internet censorship and unfamiliarity with Western Internet and social networks. However, she believes this will likely improve with time, especially with the assistance of AI.
Cora is a digital copywriter for SSLs.com. Having eight years of experience in online content creation, she is a versatile writer with an interest in a wide variety of topics, ranging from technology to marketing.