The long-running but largely ineffective pro-China "Spamouflage" influence operation has been linked to individuals connected to Chinese government enforcement, according to Facebook parent firm Meta, which announced this on Tuesday.
According to a quarterly security report, the social media giant erased over 7,700 Facebook accounts, as well as hundreds of other pages, groups, and Instagram accounts linked to the campaign, which had elements active since 2018, as reported by Reuters.
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The Spamouflage
Over the past few years, the "Spamouflage" network has intermittently promoted positive narratives about China and critical criticism of the United States, Western foreign policy, and Chinese government critics.
According to Meta executives, "Spamouflage" has grown to be the greatest known cross-platform influence operation to date with a presence on at least 50 services with the most recent activity being discovered.
The campaign's phony accounts were organized into groups that shared digital infrastructure, looked to work in distinct shifts, and had broken for lunch and dinner on Beijing time, according to Meta.
The "Spamouflage" network initially began publishing content on significant websites including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, now known as X. Recent behavior indicated that it has also increased its presence on lesser platforms like Medium, Reddit, Quora, and Vimeo, according to the corporation.
For its Facebook pages, it gathered a following of roughly 560,000 accounts, but Meta officials claimed they thought the majority of those accounts were fakes that had been bought from spammers in countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Beyond that, they claimed, they did not observe much evidence of true viewership or engagement.
A Facebook page that had previously posted Chinese-language adverts promoting lingerie quickly changed to writing English-language articles about riots in Kazakhstan, Nimmo claimed, which is reflective of the accounts' spammy origins.
Spamouflage is a Chinese state-aligned influence operation that has been active on social media since at least 2019. The network uses a variety of tactics to spread disinformation and propaganda, including creating fake accounts, using AI-generated content, and amplifying its messages through hashtags and other means.
Spamouflage's targets have included the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, and the United States. The network has also sought to promote China's global role and undermine its rivals.
Graphika, a U.S.-based research firm that tracks disinformation, has been tracking Spamouflage for several years. In a 2022 report, Graphika found that the network had grown significantly in size and sophistication. The report also found that Spamouflage was increasingly using AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to spread its messages.
Spamouflage is a significant threat to the integrity of social media and public discourse. The network's use of disinformation and propaganda can have a real-world impact, swaying public opinion and influencing political outcomes.
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