Meta disrupted China-based propaganda machine before it reached many Americans

Expand Chesnot / Contributor | Getty ImagesNews

China's ability to influence US policy by manipulating social media platforms came under intense scrutiny ahead of the midterm elections, and this week marked progress towards risk mitigation on some of the most popular US platforms.

US President Joe Biden is currently working on an agreement with the Chinese company TikTok, often considered a significant threat to the national security of the United States, with the sole aim of blocking possible propaganda or disinformation campaigns. Today, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, shared a report detailing the steps it took to take down the first "Chinese-origin influence operation" that Meta identified as attempting "to target the US domestic policy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections".

In the press release, Head of Meta Global Threat Intelligence Ben Nimmo joined Meta Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich in describing the operation as initiated by a "small network". They said that between the fall of 2021 and September 2022, there were four "widely separated and short-lived" efforts launched by groups of "about half a dozen" China-based accounts, which targeted at both US-based conservatives and liberals using platforms like Facebook. , Instagram and Twitter.

In total, Meta deleted "81 Facebook accounts, eight pages, one group and two Instagram accounts". Meta estimated that around 250 accounts joined the group, 20 accounts followed one or more pages, and less than 10 accounts followed one or both Instagram accounts.

"This is the first Chinese network we've discontinued that focused on US domestic politics prior to the midterm elections," the press release read. Previously, Meta had only disrupted Chinese networks that worked to influence opinions about American politics held by audiences outside the United States.

When Meta monitors this type of activity, which it calls "coordinated inauthentic behavior," it says in its report that it looks for fake accounts that intentionally manipulate public debate. To do this, malicious actors coordinate the actions of multiple fake accounts "in order to mislead others about who they are and what they do".

The meta-policy states that this type of moderation is for monitoring account behavior, not the content of posts. Examples in the report include fake accounts posting memes targeting the left alleging the National Rifle Association of America paid Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the right depicting a sprawling Biden clutching the world carrying guns nuclear weapons and machine guns. What gets an account taken down is not, Meta said, "what they post or if they're foreign or domestic," but whether the network would collapse without the fake accounts backing it up.

A spokesperson for Meta told Ars that it is focused on "violating misleading behavior, not content," to remove covert influence operations, because "these networks typically post content that is not blatantly false, but rather aims to mislead people about who is behind it and what they are doing."

In the press release, Nimmo and Agranovich summarized the extent of the Chinese network's reach and how Meta managed to detect its deceptive behaviors, writing, "Few people have engaged with it, and some of those who did called it fake.Our automated systems have removed a number of Facebook accounts and pages for various violations of community standards, including impersonation and inauthenticity. ."

In the same report, Meta described the withdrawal of a much larger case of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" from Russia.

Described as the largest Russian network of its kind that Meta has "disrupted since the start of the war in Ukraine", this second operation targeted users based "mainly in Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine and UK". Its online presence spanned 1,633 Facebook accounts, 703 Facebook pages, a Facebook group, and 29...