New Delhi: China has been running an “influence campaign” that targets its adversaries and furthers the East Asian country’s own interests, a New York Times report has found.
According to researchers at Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta, the campaign was started by China’s law enforcement, and was spread in a timely manner across social media channels Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Substack and Chinese websites. This was the seventh such influence operation that Meta had removed in the past 6 years.
When the same influence campaign – in place since 2019 – published reports across social media and blogging platforms that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, Meta’s security team conducted the “biggest single takedown” where it removed more than 700 social media accounts that were tied to the Chinese campaign.
Meta’s global security team removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups and 15 Instagram accounts. Ben Nimmo, the head of security at Meta, called it the “largest covert campaign” across the Internet till date.
How do the campaigns operate?
The campaigns were styled similar to the Russian influence operations and were multilingual – in Chinese, Russian, German, Thai, Korean and Welsh. Aimed at a broader audience, they were posted across platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, that are banned in China.
The Chinese financial website, Nanyangmoney, also had similar messages posted in Chinese.
With a set of identical messages with a pro-Chinese agenda, the “wide and noisy” network failed to reach an audience due to the numerous duplicated comments that came under each post which limited its reach, Meta said.
The campaign initially began by discrediting the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and soon moved on to the Covid pandemic. In 2019, a 66 page research paper – published on Zenodo, an online website for academic papers – claimed that Covid had originated in the US. The paper was widely promoted via links on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo. However, they did not find a huge readership.
In 2020, Meta claimed that under the campaign, China had posted videos in English on racial divisions in the US, which soon went viral. Under scrutiny for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims, another TikTok video – viewed 7,000 times – showed a woman arguing about peace in Xinjiang.
The crackdown
The campaign was discovered in 2019 by Meta’s security team and Graphika, another company that studies social media. While such accounts were removed from Meta’s platforms, they are still active across X (previously Twitter) and Reddit, the New York Times report said. The campaign keeps returning with newer accounts and different codes.
However, Meta’s efforts led to results that were soon visible. The posts were easily identifiable as they were riddled with grammatical errors and were filled with spam links. The campaign’s reach was impacted heavily. As a part of its quarterly security report, Meta published the four other times it had taken down such campaigns in 2022.
The report comes at a time when the US commerce secretary is in China to discuss trade relations between both countries.
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