Meta removed Chinese Facebook accounts likely designed to polarize U.S. and Indian voters ahead of the 2024 elections.
Last quarter, Meta removed 4,789 fake Facebook accounts in China that it identified as participating in coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) targeting the United States, according to the company. most recent transparency report released yesterday (November 30). Fake account owners posed as Americans to post content on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) about American politics and US-China relations ahead of the November 2024 election.
To appear more authentic, the accounts posted links to news articles from major US media outlets, shared Facebook posts by real people, and split political posts with other topics like gaming and pets; they also tended to use the same name and profile picture across platforms.
“Instead of creating his own content, he copied tweets written by real people, (including) American politicians on both sides of the aisle. None of them managed to build an authentic audience,” the tech giant wrote.
Fraudulent accounts have also targeted another country that will hold a major election in 2024: India, the world’s largest democracy, which will choose its national government in April and May.
“Unusually, in mid-2023, a small portion of accounts on this network changed their name and profile picture from posing as Americans to posing as residents of India, when “They suddenly started liking and commenting on posts from the other Chinese-origin network focused on India and Tibet,” Meta revealed.
The harvest of accounts and groups targeting Tibet and the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh cast a narrower net: Meta removed just 13 accounts and seven groups for fraudulent activity. The majority of fake accounts posed as journalists, lawyers and human rights activists, and a handful as Americans sharing links to articles from major US media outlets like HuffPost, Breitbart, Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
China is the third largest source of CIB on Meta, after Russia and Iran.
Déjà vu: Meta has already taken down a Chinese “spam” network
In August, Meta removed 7,700 Facebook accounts linked to the Chinese CIB network nicknamed “Spamouflage”, which Meta described at the time as “the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world”. It also removed 954 associated Facebook pages. Meta said the campaign did not gain traction with its actual user base.
Quote: Foreign interference in 2024 elections continues
“Overall, these networks have continued to struggle to grow their audiences and shift to smaller platforms, but they serve as a warning that foreign threat actors are attempting to reach their audiences ahead of various state elections. next year, particularly in the United States and Europe, and we need to remain attentive to the evolution of their tactics and their targeting on the Internet.
Meta’s electoral preparation, in figures
40,000: Meta employees currently working on safety and security
$20 billion+: Invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016
100: Partners in Meta’s independent global fact-checking network, which examines and evaluates viral misinformation in more than 60 languages
200+: Malicious influence campaigns using CIB Meta were removed on November 30.
700+: Hate groups that Meta has named around the world, including more than 400 white supremacist organizations
10.1 billion: Estimated views of 100 prominent pages repeatedly sharing misinformation on Facebook ahead of the 2020 US election, according to a report from online advocacy group Avaaz
Nearly 100 million: US voters who saw fraudulent content on Facebook before this election, same report says
