China is behind the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on Facebook and Instagram, according to a new report by security researchers at Meta.
Meta on Tuesday outed the authors of a four-year long influence campaign dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon,” which first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Since then, the campaign has focused on spreading disinformation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, attacking dissidents and critics abroad, criticizing the United States, and attempting to sow division during the 2022 midterm elections.
For years, researchers have speculated that the voluminous Spamouflage Dragon posts were connected to the Chinese government but have been unable to publicly prove a link until now. The link comes courtesy of overlapping content found in both Meta’s report and charges filed against Chinese intelligence operatives back in spring.
I don’t know why the expectation exists that they should want to build an audience. You don’t need to build an audience to cause chaos. You just need the chaos message to generate enough noise to confuse people.
Or this is just the smoke screen actions and there are much more extensive actions that might actually be working on the rest of the platforms.
deleted by creator
Half a million people is a drop in the market by almost any measure.
Put it this way: if you had half a million followers on TikTok, would you be happy? Not really.
Except they’re not trying to monetize, so they don’t care. They’re trying to encourage disruption, which even one unstable individual can go out and do.
Given how close some of our recent elections have been, and in the closest one, how different the very straight-laced Al Gore and more cowboy/frat boy George W were, it doesn’t take many people to create a huge shift in how our country approaches things for a period of time.
One of the two rejected global warming, the other made a documentary about it, as an example of how different the candidates were.
No government is going to toss millions of dollars at a project that gets no results
Results for them has nothing to do with “an audience”. I have an audience right now, but I don’t have “an audience”. Do you understand the difference I’m referring to?