Facebook parent company Meta announced it has dismantled a prolific Chinese disinformation campaign, which it describes as the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation it's tracked to date.
Dubbed “Spamouflage,” the operation targeted multiple countries across the world, including Taiwan, the US, Australia, the UK, Japan, and global Chinese-speaking audiences.
Meta said the operation was active across more than 50 platforms and forums, including X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium, Blogspot, LiveJournal, VKontakte, Vimeo, and dozens of smaller platforms and forums, as well as Facebook and Instagram. The network pushed positive narratives about China and its province Xinjiang and criticisms of the US and Western foreign policies, as well as critics of the Chinese government including journalists and researchers.
The company said it removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 pages, 15 groups and 15 Instagram accounts linked to the Spamouflage campaign for violating its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior.
“Despite the very large number of accounts and platforms it used, Spamouflage consistently struggled to reach beyond its own (fake) echo chamber,” the social media company noted. “Many comments on Spamouflage posts that we have observed came from other Spamouflage accounts trying to make it look like they were more popular than they were. Only a few instances have been reported when Spamouflage content on Twitter and YouTube was amplified by real-world influencers, so it is important to keep reporting and taking action against these attempts while realizing that its overall ability to reach authentic audiences has been consistently very low.”
Meta also said it blocked thousands of malicious website domains as well fake accounts associated with the Russian operation known as Doppelganger. The operation was focused on mimicking websites of mainstream news outlets and government entities to post fake articles aimed at weakening support for Ukraine. Meta said it has now expanded beyond initially targeting France, Germany and Ukraine to also include the US and Israel.
“This is the largest and the most aggressively-persistent Russian-origin operation we’ve taken down since 2017,” the company noted.
