China behind ‘largest ever’ digital influence operation – POLITICO

People with ties to China’s law enforcement agencies conducted the largest known covert digital influence operation aimed at discrediting the West and promoting Beijing’s agenda across more than 50 social media and online platforms, according to a report published Tuesday by Meta.

On Facebook, clandestine users with ties to the authoritarian government racked up more than 550,000 followers by spouting lies about the United States’ alleged role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic and criticizing Washington’s support of Taiwan.

On Reddit, other China-linked keyboard warriors falsely implicated former British Prime Minister Liz Truss in the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

And in multiple online forums and social media sites — including Medium, YouTube, Twitter and Quora — even more users targeted Chinese dissidents and promoted Beijing’s talking points.

The campaign, which lasted over a year, garnered few, if any, eyeballs from real social media users, based on Meta’s analysis. But the breadth of the international influence campaign by those associated with the Chinese government highlights how Beijing is vying for prominence alongside Moscow as the most active spreader of disinformation ahead of major elections in the European Union, U.S. and the United Kingdom next year.

The China campaign “is the largest covert influence operation that’s currently active in the world today,” Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead, told POLITICO. “Pick a place on the internet, and they’re probably trying to go there to spread effectively a fairly simple set of messages that praise China and criticize the United States and for Western foreign policies.”

In a separate covert influence campaign, Meta found groups in Russia had created fake news websites that mimicked those of the Washington Post and Fox News to promote the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine — a tactic the social media giant first flagged last September.

“Ahead of all the elections next year, we do expect that they will keep on trying,” Nimmo said in reference to how China- and Russia-based disinformation groups were ratcheting up their influence campaigns. Meta alone has broken up four China-linked operations in the last year, he said.

Chinese office hours

Meta did not give further detail on why it had attributed this latest covert digital influence operation to Chinese law enforcement.

But the yearlong campaign included scores of China-based teams — all working from the same digital infrastructure and messaging playbook — pumping out pro-Beijing talking points across almost 8,000 Facebook accounts and 15 Instagram accounts. The operation also spread to include YouTube videos, Quora responses and even fake comments posted on a forum for Luxembuger Wort, a Luxembourg newspaper.

The Chinese influence peddlers worked regular office hours, based on Meta’s analysis of the covert campaign. The unknown state-linked actors took regularly breaks for lunch and dinner, all done within Chinese timezones — despite the tricksters pretending they were located across the Western world.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the sophisticated tactics, the campaign’s impact was negligible, at best.

The China-based group made rudimentary mistakes like posting a Mandarin social media post under an English-language headline, and vice versa. Others misstated dates like when Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, traveled to Taiwan. Even more made outlandish statements — like the United Nations had voted against the U.S. in a recent resolution — were quickly mocked by real digital users, Meta said.

“They don’t yet seem to have really reached real people,” Nimmo said.

Russian fake news sites

In mid-February, the Washington Post seemingly landed a blockbuster exclusive. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief that he was, in fact, a puppet of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The revelations — published on the same day, under the same byline as a legitimate Washington Post article — were fake. They were circulated on a false site that mimicked that of the Washington-based news outlet.

Meta first unearthed this covert campaign last year when the company’s investigators and outside researchers discovered fake news sites created by Russian-based groups had spoofed European news outlets’ sites, including those from the U.K.’s Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel.

On Tuesday, the tech giant said those tactics had now extended to target American and Israeli outlets with pro-Russian narratives aimed at sowing doubt in the West’s support of Ukraine. Separately, Russian-based groups similarly promoted fake stories allegedly from POLITICO, though it was unclear if that covert activity was associated with what Meta had discovered.

Meta’s Nimmo said a lot of attention had gone into recreating the fake news sites, including domain names that almost matched those of the real news outlets. But when it came to promoting the pro-Kremlin disinformation, the Russian actors — like their Chinese counterparts — had failed to reach real people.

“There is [a] very odd imbalance between the two halves of the operation,” he said. “You have the relative sophistication of the web domains, and then there’s just this desperate ‘pray-and-spray’ across social media platforms.”