On February 27, an article was published on the blogging platforms Substack and Blogspot claiming that the United States was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream submarine pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
Within 24 hours, the article — and other versions of it — had been posted to more websites, including Reddit, Medium, Tumblr, Facebook, and YouTube. Translations of the article in Greek, German, Russian, Italian and Turkish also began appearing online.
The messages were part of a Chinese influence campaign that stands out as the largest such operation to date, Meta researchers said in a report Tuesday. The effort, which the company said was begun with Chinese law enforcement and discovered in 2019, was aimed at advancing Chinese interests and discrediting its opponents, such as the United States, Meta said.
A total of 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups and 15 Instagram accounts related to the China campaign were deleted by Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Hundreds of other accounts on TikTok, X, LiveJournal and Blogspot also participated in the campaign, which researchers dubbed Spamouflage due to the frequent posting of spammy messages, the Meta report said.
“This is the largest single network takedown we’ve ever performed,” said Ben Nimmo, head of Meta’s security team that looks at global threats. “If you put it together with all the activity we gathered on the internet, we came to the conclusion that this is the largest covert campaign we know of today.”
The Chinese campaign struggled to reach people and grab attention, Mr Nimmo said. Some posts were full of spelling mistakes and poor grammar, while others were incongruous, such as random links under Quora articles that people could see had nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
Yet the operation is revealed at a sensitive time in the relationship between the United States and China. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is in China this week to talk with government officials and Chinese business leaders about trade relations. She is the fourth senior US official to travel to China in less than three months.
The influence operation was the seventh from China to remove Meta in the past six years. Four of them were found in the past year, said the company, which published details about the new operation as part of a quarterly safety report.
The attempt seemed to “learn and emulate” Russian-style influence operations, Meta said. It also turned out to be aimed at a wide audience. Sometimes posts were in Chinese on websites such as the Chinese financial forum Nanyangmoney. At other times, there were posts in Russian, German, French, Korean, Thai and Welsh on sites like Facebook and Instagram, which are banned in China.
Chinese law enforcement appeared to be working on the campaign from offices across the country, Meta said. Each office appeared to operate in shifts, with activity mid-morning and early afternoon, and breaks for lunch and dinner, the report said.
The accounts regularly posted identical messages across various social media platforms, in a timed effort to spread pro-Chinese messages online. The network was ‘broad and loud’, Mr Nimmo said, but struggled to reach people, in part because ‘it was the same comment many times a day’.
“It was like they copied them from a numbered list and forgot to proofread them before posting,” he added.
Though Meta has removed the campaign from Facebook and Instagram, many of the operation’s accounts on platforms like X, Reddit and TikTok remain online, according to a review from DailyExpertNews.
The effort was discovered in 2019 by Mr Nimmo and other researchers at Graphika, a social media studies company. Meta said it had removed elements of the operation in recent years, but the campaign kept coming back with new accounts and tactics.
The operation was initially aimed at discrediting the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. In February 2020, efforts shifted to the Covid-19 outbreak, dismissing claims that China was the origin of the virus and placing the blame on the United States.
In one case, the operation published a 66-page investigative paper falsely claiming that Covid started in the United States. It appeared on the Zenodo website, an online repository where researchers and academics can upload papers and datasets.
YouTube and Vimeo videos subsequently promoted the research paper, along with posts on blogging platforms such as LiveJournal, Tumblr and Medium claiming that the United States had been hiding the true origins of Covid. Links to those posts were then published on Facebook and other social media sites, although many of the posts were not widely read.
In June 2020, the network began posting English-language videos to YouTube and TikTok highlighting racial disparities in the United States, in an apparent attempt to sow division. Some of those videos went viral.
Meta also included links to TikTok accounts in its report that they said were part of the Chinese operation. One of the most popular videos, viewed by The Times, featured a woman arguing in Chinese that life in Xinjiang, a far northwestern region of China, was peaceful. China is under international scrutiny for pursuing repressive policies against Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in the region.
The TikTok video has been viewed more than 7,000 times.
