Meta Ends Huge China, Russia Sites Attacking Democracy

Meta says Chinese and Russian influence operations the company recently took down are among the biggest it’s ever discovered.

The Facebook parent company also said that Chinese law enforcement is behind the Chinese influence operation, which spread pro-China messages and attacked critics of Beijing’s policies through a network of fake accounts, NPR reported.

Using platforms from Facebook and Instagram to YouTube, X, TikTok, and Reddit, among others, the operation posted links to articles that praised China and criticized U.S. and European foreign policy, as well as ostensibly personal comments that seemed to be copied and pasted from a list.

"They were really trying to spread their way across the internet and to try to spread their message across the internet," Ben Nimmo, Meta's global threat intelligence lead, told NPR.

Despite the operation’s scale, Meta said the fake accounts failed to gain traction with real people, on its own platforms or elsewhere, and said few legitimate accounts interacted with the content.

Meta's discovery of "links to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement" and confirmation of the operation’s size are huge steps forward for researchers and call attention to how China, along with Russia and Iran, has become a key player in global influence operations.

"China is investing an enormous amount of money in the full spectrum of state propaganda, of which this is an important part," Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, said in a report released earlier this month.

Social media is "an important layer because it creates a façade of engagement on their chosen narratives ... that are either beneficial to the [Chinese Communist Party] or harmful to its perceived competitors," he added.

While Meta did not provide additional details about how it determined the operation was linked to the Chinese government, the company reportedly uses technical signals and behavioral indicators, such as the timing of posts and language patterns, to draw its conclusions.

Tech companies and independent groups have been tracking seemingly unrelated clusters of fake accounts blazing pro-China content trails across social media since 2019.

Dubbed “spamouflage” for the fake accounts’ technique of mixing political posts with random pictures and video, affiliated account clusters were behind the online attacks on pro-democracy Hong Kong protestors, the Trump administration, and praise for China’s COVID-19 response.

Researchers had suspected the accounts were linked for some time, but had not been able to prove it, Nimmo told NPR.

"It really is all one operation," Nimmo said. "And for the first time, not only have we been able to tie all this activity together, but we've been able to link it to individuals who are associated with Chinese law enforcement."

Meanwhile, Meta said on Tuesday that it was continuing to remove fake accounts and block websites connected to a Russian influence operation seeking to undercut support for Ukraine.

First identified by the company last year, the “Doppelganger” operation carefully impersonated legitimate news organization websites and posted links to articles critical of Ukraine and Western countries. Meta has attributed the operation to a Russian public relations firm and a Russian information technology company, both of which have been sanctioned by the European Union.

According to NPR, the Russian operation has impersonated U.S. news outlets like The Washington Post and Fox News, as well as two Israeli news sites, in recent months. It has also created fake websites impersonating NATO, the Polish and Ukrainian governments, the German police, and French Foreign Ministry.

"This is a single-minded influence operation," Nimmo said. "It really has one mission, and that is to undermine international support for Ukraine."