4,789 Facebook accounts in China pretended to be Americans, Meta says

Meta announced Thursday that it had removed thousands of China-based Facebook accounts posing as Americans debating political issues in the United States. The company warned that the campaign was a harbinger of coordinated international efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election.

The network of fake accounts – 4,789 in total – used names and photos pulled from elsewhere on the internet and copied partisan political content from X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta said in its latest quarterly earnings call. enemy threat analysis. The copied material included messages from prominent Republican and Democratic politicians, the report said.

It appeared that the campaign was not intended to favor one side or the other, but to highlight the deep divisions in American politics, a tactic that Russia’s influence campaigns have used for years in the United States and elsewhere.

Meta warned that the campaign underlined the threat facing a confluence of elections around the world in 2024 – from India in April to the United States in November.

“Foreign threat actors are seeking to reach the public ahead of next year’s various elections, including in the US and Europe,” the company’s report said, “and we must remain alert to their evolving tactics and targets online.”

While Meta did not attribute the latest campaign to China’s communist government, it noted that the country has become the third most common geographic source for coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and other social media platforms, after Russia and Iran.

The Chinese network was the fifth that Meta has discovered and taken down this year, more than in any other country, indicating that China is stepping up its efforts to exert covert influence. While previous campaigns focused on Chinese issues, the latest campaigns have had a more direct impact on domestic American politics.

“This represents the most notable change in the threat landscape compared to the 2020 election cycle,” the company said in the threat report.

Meta’s report followed a series of revelations about China’s global information operations, including a recent State Department report that accused China of spending billions on “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment.

Microsoft and other researchers have also linked China to the spread of conspiracy theories claiming the US government deliberately started this year’s deadly wildfires in Hawaii.

The latest inauthentic accounts removed by Meta aimed to “hijack authentic partisan narratives,” the report said. It included several examples in which the accounts copied and pasted partisan posts from politicians under their own names – often using language and symbols that indicated the posts were originally on X.

For example, two Facebook posts a month apart in August and September copied opposing statements on abortion from two members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas: Sylvia R. Garcia, a Democrat, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican.

The accounts also linked to mainstream media organizations and shared posts from X’s owner, Elon Musk. They also like and post content from real Facebook users on other topics, such as games, fashion models and pets. The activity suggested that the accounts were intended to build a network of apparently authentic accounts to spread a coordinated message in the future.

Meta also removed a similar, smaller network from China that focused mainly on India and Tibet, but also on the United States. In the case of Tibet, users posed as pro-independence activists who accused the Dalai Lama of corruption and pedophilia.

Meta warned that although it had removed the accounts, the same networks continued to use accounts on other platforms, including X, YouTube, Gettr, Telegram and Truth Social, warning that foreign adversaries were diversifying the sources of their activities.

In her report, Meta also addressed Republican attacks on the U.S. government’s role in monitoring disinformation online, a political and legal battle that reached the Supreme Court after a challenge from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

While Republicans have accused officials of forcing social media platforms to censor content, including during a hearing in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Meta said coordination between tech companies, government and law enforcement had disrupted foreign threats.

“This type of information sharing could be particularly critical in disrupting malicious foreign campaigns by sophisticated threat actors who coordinate their operations outside of our platforms,” the report said.