The company said it has taken down five different networks with ties to China, a sign that the country could be ramping up its propaganda efforts ahead of the U.S. election.
China has become one of the most aggressive actors attempting to sway U.S. public opinion through fake accounts on social media, Meta said Thursday, despite still finding little success in those efforts.
In a quarterly report on inauthentic account behavior on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Meta said it had taken down five distinct Chinese networks targeting foreign audiences this year, more than from any other country.
“For comparison, between 2017 and November 2020, we took down two networks from China, and both mainly focused on the Asia-Pacific region,” the company said in its report. “This represents the most notable change in the threat landscape, when compared with the 2020 election cycle.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
China has become one of the most aggressive actors attempting to sway U.S. public opinion through fake accounts on social media, Meta said Thursday, despite still finding little success in those efforts.
In a quarterly report on inauthentic account behavior on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Meta said it had taken down five distinct Chinese networks targeting foreign audiences this year, more than from any other country.
“If you look at the China-origin influence operations that we’ve taken down and disclosed over the last year and a half, they’re coming from multiple different actors,” he said, noting that his team had attributed some campaigns to tech firms in China and one to Chinese law enforcement.
In its 2023 annual threat assessment report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that China is prioritizing influence campaigns, especially as both major U.S. political parties routinely criticize Beijing.
Beijing’s growing efforts to actively exploit perceived U.S. societal divisions using its online personas move it closer to Moscow’s playbook for influence operations,” the ODNI said in its report.
Dakota Cary, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said the repeated failed efforts to create pro-China influence operations could reflect that some propagandists have received bureaucratic orders despite the fact that Meta and some other companies routinely take them down.
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