Meta’s recent operation, described as the ‘biggest single takedown,’ was directed at a Chinese Influence Campaign, resulting in the removal of 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups, and 15 Instagram accounts associated with the Chinese campaign, as reported by The New York Times.
On February 27, an article claimed that the United States was responsible for the bombing of the Nord Stream underwater pipelines in the Baltic Sea. This article initially appeared on the Substack and Blogspot blogging platforms.
Within 24 hours, the article, along with various versions of it, had been posted on multiple websites, including Reddit, Medium, Tumblr, Facebook, and YouTube. Translations of the article in Greek, German, Russian, Italian, and Turkish also began to surface online.
According to The New York Times, these posts were part of a massive Chinese influence campaign, marking the largest operation of its kind to date, according to Meta researchers in a report released on Tuesday.
Meta stated that the campaign, which it noted had its origins with Chinese law enforcement and was discovered in 2019, aimed to promote China’s interests while discrediting its adversaries, including the United States.
The Meta report revealed that hundreds of other accounts on platforms such as TikTok, X, LiveJournal, and Blogspot also participated in the campaign, which researchers dubbed “Spamouflage” due to the frequent posting of spam-like messages.
Ben Nimmo, the head of Meta’s security team responsible for global threats, stated, “This is the biggest single takedown of a single network we have ever conducted. When you put it together with all the activity we took down across the internet, we concluded it is the largest covert campaign that we know of today.”
Despite its size, the Chinese campaign faced challenges in reaching and attracting the attention of its target audience. Some posts contained spelling errors and poor grammar, while others were incongruent, such as random links under Quora articles that were unrelated to the subject being discussed, according to The New York Times.
However, this revelation comes at a sensitive time in the relationship between the United States and China. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is currently in China for discussions with government officials and Chinese business leaders concerning trade relations. She is the fourth senior US official to visit China in less than three months.
Meta’s removal of this influence operation marks the seventh such action against Chinese campaigns in the last six years. Four of these campaigns were discovered in the past year, according to the company, which disclosed details of the latest operation as part of a quarterly security report, as reported by The New York Times.
