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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, said it had removed thousands of fake accounts that were part of China-based covert operations to influence social-media users from the U.S. and elsewhere.
Meta took down three different "covert influence operations" networks this quarter—two linked to China and one to Russia—according to the company's third-quarter report on investigations on "coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB).
The report comes at a sensitive time in the international information space, which have become another geopolitical battleground between Washington and Beijing. The U.S. State Department in September raised the alarm about China's "global information manipulation." China turned the accusation around, saying the U.S. had invented that very strategy.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment.
Meta said that the content shared by these operations aligned with Beijing's interests globally, though no links to the Chinese government had been found. China is the third most common geographic source of foreign coordinated inauthentic behavior, following Russia and Iran, it said.
One China-based network Meta removed included 4,789 fake Facebook accounts that were meant to seem like those of American citizens. These accounts posted about U.S. politics and China-U.S. relations.
The social-media giant highlighted that these accounts pasted seemingly random content from American politicians across the political spectrum.
"Russia's war crimes in Ukraine continue. This time with the use of food as a weapon of war," read one post copy-pasted from Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) account.
"Taxpayer dollars should NEVER fund travel for abortions, especially if those dollars are meant for our military," read a post by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) shared by another fake account.
"It's unclear whether this approach was designed to amplify partisan tensions, build audiences among these politicians' supporters, or to make the fake accounts sharing authentic content appear more genuine," the report said.
Another of the Chinese networks included 13 accounts and seven groups primarily targeting India and the Tibet region, with a lesser focus on the U.S. The accounts masqueraded as lawyers, human-rights activists, and journalists on Facebook as well as X (formerly Twitter).
In some cases, these accounts, while posing as supporters of Tibet's independence from China, posted allegations of pedophilia and corruption against the region's leader-in-exile the Dalai Lama and his followers.
They also accused the Indian government of fostering human-rights abuses in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. On occasion, this network also occasionally pretended to be Americans sharing stories by U.S. media.
The accounts appeared to interact among themselves on various posts, seemingly to make the accounts seem legitimate, according to the report.
The Russia-linked accounts targeted English speakers throughout the world. This network's posts were focused on Russia's war with Ukraine and also promoted fake media brands that were shared on social media by multiple Russian diplomatic missions.
"We view CIB as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal, in which fake accounts are central to the operation," Meta said. The company reiterated its commitment to targeting deceptive accounts based on their behavior, irrespective of content or country of origin.
The purged accounts bring the total number of such networks removed so far this year to five, Meta said.
Update 11/30/23, 10:30 p.m. ET: A previous version of this article said Jason Crow was a representative from Wisconsin.
About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more