One of Facebook’s flaws is that it bans people just for talking about stuff—whenever the Meta hall monitors determine that the discussion may be injurious to readers’ ideological health. But Facebook also scrubs fake or troll Facebook accounts. And in September 2023, a flock of Chinese Communist Party agitprop accounts, part of a so-called spamouflage operation, got gone.
Via Radio Free Asia, Jing Wei reports (August 30, 2023):
Facebook’s parent company Meta has deleted thousands of accounts with suspected links to the Chinese government, describing them as “the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world.”
The Chinese Communist Party had targeted more than 50 apps, including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, the company said in an Aug. 29 blog post.
“We were able to tie this activity together to confirm it was part of one operation known in the security community as spamouflage and link it to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement,” it said, citing similar threats originating out of Russia.
China has been stepping up its efforts to influence and manipulate news and information worldwide, and has used an array of tools to project a positive image of itself abroad, the U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House reported in September 2022.
Meta said it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts originating in China for violating its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior….
Sometimes the [duplicate “personal”] comments would even have a number attached, indicating it had likely been copied and pasted from a numbered list.
From The Guardian:
Meta said one of the big campaigns the operation ran was posts trying to claim the origin of Covid was the US, including a 66-page “research paper” the group published, which included consistently misspelling the name of key protagonists in the paper.
Though expunged for now from Facebook, the pro-China trolls are still invading other social media, especially Twitter. According to rights activist Lin Shengliang, Twitter is the “main battlefield.” Lin says that although China used to hire Internet commentators, “it has started getting prisoners to work as trolls in groups. They are more organized now, and sometimes pretend to be dissidents, and try to change the direction of the narrative at critical moments.”
We know Elon Musk is busy, but—get on that, would you, Mr. Musk?
