China has increased its efforts to manipulate people in other countries on social media, becoming the third most common source of foreign influence operations behind Russia and Iran, according to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Meta took down a network of five Chinese fake accounts in 2023, the highest number of any country this year, the company said in a new report released Thursday. This is a significant increase compared to 2019, when Meta removed a China-based fake account campaign for the first time.
“This is the most significant change in the threat landscape compared to 2020,” said Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead.
The targets of the Chinese operations Meta has shut down include people in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Europe and the United States. Nimmo said the campaigns vary widely in how they operate, but their focus is on promoting China’s interests, from defending Beijing’s human rights record to attacking government critics.
“There is a kind of global mandate here. And they use a lot of different tactics. So we’ve seen small operations trying to establish personality. We’ve also seen larger operations using large, unwieldy, sort of spam networks,” he said. “The common denominator, apart from the Chinese ones, is that they’re all struggling to get a real audience.”
Meta most recently took down two China-based operations in the third quarter of this year. One was a network of about 4,800 Facebook accounts impersonating Americans and posting about domestic politics and US-China relations.
Using fake names and profile pictures copied from elsewhere on the internet, the accounts copied and pasted posts by American politicians on X. The copying spanned political parties, including Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, as well as the presidential campaign war room of Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
“It is unclear whether this approach was designed to heighten partisan tensions, build audiences among supporters of these politicians, or make fake accounts sharing original content appear more real,” Meta said in its report.
The posts were clearly copied, some with phrases like “RT” for retweet and the @ symbol used before the username X. Some accounts shared posts by X’s owner Elon Musk, as well as links to news articles and Facebook posts by real people. Meta said it removed the accounts before they could receive engagement from real users.
The other network Meta removed was smaller but more complex. It consisted of 13 Facebook accounts and seven groups, mostly targeting Tibet and India. The accounts posed as journalists, lawyers and human rights activists. Some used the same names and profile pictures on X.
They posted about regional news, sports and culture, criticized the Dalai Lama, and accused the Indian government of corruption while praising the Indian military, athletes and scientific achievements. A handful of accounts pretended to be American and posted links to US news sources. About 1,400 accounts had joined one of the groups before they were shut down, Meta said.
Nimmo said the contrast in the two campaigns shows the diversity of tactics used by China-based networks. “There is no single playbook that can apply to Chinese [influence operations],” he said.
Meta did not tie either network to a specific actor in China. The company has previously attributed other disrupted operations to the Chinese government, IT firms and Chinese law enforcement.
State actors expected to target elections around the world in 2024
Nimmo said that with a number of elections coming up in 2024, including in the US, Taiwan, India and the European Union, Chinese operations could “pivot” to target discussion of relations with China in these countries. This would be in addition to the expected operations in Russia and Iran.
