This is one of the biggest disinformation campaigns ever known on the social network Facebook. Dubbed “Spamouflage”, what now turns out to be a Chinese propaganda operation has been going on for years. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on Tuesday August 29 that it had deleted thousands of accounts on the social network that were part of this online Chinese propaganda operation. “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.
Over 7,000 accounts deleted
More than 7,700 Facebook accounts and about 15 Instagram accounts are affected, making it the largest account deletion action, Meta said. Very significant figures, compared to the campaigns usually detected by the company, which only exceptionally exceed a thousand accounts. 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. This network was mainly aimed at spreading “positive comments about China and the province of Xinjiang (where the Uighur minority is victim of persecution), and negative messages aimed at the United States, Western governments and journalists and researchers critical of the government. Chinese,” observes Meta.
According to information provided by Meta, the network of influence was installed in China and targeted in particular Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Japan, as well as the Chinese-speaking audience abroad. The campaign’s fake account groups were operated from different parts of China, but shared digital infrastructure and appeared to operate under well-defined working patterns, including lunch and dinner breaks on Beijing time, Meta said. The operation also relied heavily on Medium, Reddit, X, YouTube, Soundcloud and Vimeo, according to Meta’s threat team. While the network’s accounts had amassed around 560,000 followers, they generated very few comments, likes or shares from real user accounts, the company says. “This operation was big and loud, but it struggled to get past its own echo chamber,” said Ben Nimmo, global threat intelligence manager at Meta.
Operation “Doppelgänger” now in Meta’s sights
Separately, Meta researchers reported that some of the tactics employed by “Spamouflage” were very similar to those of a Russian network updated in 2019, seeming to emphasize that these operations learn from each other, according to Ben Nimmo.
The report published by Meta also carried out an analysis of a campaign called “Doppelgänger”, discovered a year ago by its teams. The heart of the operation consisted in making copies, “doppelgänger” in English, of major media websites in Europe to publish false 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”, alerted Nathaniel Gleicher. This is, he said, the largest and most advanced influence operation by Russia since 2017.