China is stepping up 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 has taken down five Chinese networks of fake accounts in 2023, the most of any country this year, the company said in a new report published on Thursday. That’s a significant increase from 2019, when Meta first removed a campaign based in China, although the country’s efforts over the years haven’t gained much traction.
“This is the most notable change in the threat landscape compared with 2020,” said Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead.
The targets of the Chinese operations that Meta has disrupted include people in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Europe and the United States. The campaigns vary widely in how they work, but the focus tends to be on promoting Chinese interests, from defending Beijing’s human rights record to attacking government critics, Nimmo said.
“There’s a very kind of global mandate there. And they are using many different tactics. So we’ve seen small operations that try and build personas. We’ve seen larger operations using large, clunky, sort of spammy networks,” he said. “The common denominator, other than origin in China, is really that they’re all struggling to get any kind of authentic audience.”
Latest Chinese operations targeted U.S., Tibet and India
Most recently, Meta took down two China-based operations in the third quarter of this year. One was a network of around 4,800 Facebook accounts impersonating Americans and…
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