The parent company of Facebook, Meta, declared on Tuesday that it had taken down a coordinated electronic campaign with Chinese origins that sought to sway US politics in advance of the midterm elections in November.
According to a blog post by Meta, the “small network” with Chinese roots was discovered on a number of social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Prior to the election on November 8, it “targeted people on both sides of the political spectrum.”
According to Meta, this was the first takedown of a Chinese-origin network that was aimed at US domestic politics.
In the Czech Republic, the network also engaged in anti-government activities, “critiquing the state’s support of Ukraine in the war with Russia and its impact on the Czech economy, using the criticism to warn against antagonising China,” according to Meta.
“Instead of posting content when their target audiences would typically be awake, each cluster of accounts—roughly a half-dozen each—posted content infrequently during China’s working hours. Few individuals interacted with it, and those who did labelled it as fake “It was ad.
Between the fall of 2021 and September of 2022, the group was active.
Additionally, Meta dismantled a “large network” that it claimed originated in Russia and targeted individuals in Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, and the UK with stories it claimed were centred on the Kremlin’s ongoing conflict with Ukraine.
According to Meta, the network started operating in May and published articles that appeared to be from reliable news sources, such as Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and Bild, but actually were criticisms of Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees.
The social media firm discovered that the content was reposted on the official Facebook pages of Russian embassies in Europe and Asia on “a few occasions.”
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, “this is the largest and most complex Russian-origin operation that we’ve disrupted,” the statement read. “It demonstrated an unusual fusion of sophistication and power. The use of multiple languages and the spoof websites required linguistic and technical investment.”