China is behind the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on Facebook and Instagram, according to a new report by security researchers at Meta.
Meta on Tuesday outed the authors of a four-year long influence campaign dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon,” which first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Since then, the campaign has focused on spreading disinformation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, attacking dissidents and critics abroad, criticizing the United States, and attempting to sow division during the 2022 midterm elections.
For years, researchers have speculated that the voluminous Spamouflage Dragon posts were connected to the Chinese government but have been unable to publicly prove a link until now. The link comes courtesy of overlapping content found in both Meta’s report and charges filed against Chinese intelligence operatives back in spring.
I’ll assume there is a long list of influential Americans that got paid.
maybe a short list of people running social media platforms, getting paid under the table
I hope you aren’t implying that the company that released this report linking spam to the Chinese government is actually taking bribes from the Chinese government, because that would just be silly lol.
If you mean other platforms like Reddit and Twitter… maybe, but I still think it’s unlikely. I’m sure it’s a lot cheaper to let accounts be blocked and create new spam accounts than to actually pay off platforms to let those spam accounts exist, especially because moderation on social media platforms has always been a very difficult thing to get right.
i’ll bet a suitcase full of Chinese cash could find someone to help them, wherever they needed it, in any of those operations
Uh, sure, maybe, but my point is why give away suitcases full of cash when you don’t need to
i don’t know… it’s an intelligence operation, they use all vectors that are available and functioning… it’s not a business… i guess we’ll see how comprehensive it’s been…
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Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. A lot of these people are very stupid.
So apparently they really suck at it? That’s kind of hilarious
The trolls have demonstrated a weak command of idiomatic English with articles that, while prolific, often misspell key names or use English and Mandarin interchangeably. Other posts — like a critique of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 trip to Taiwan — appear long after the events they purported to preview.
At other times, the spammers attempted to push niche and esoteric Chinese propaganda talking points onto unreceptive audiences by piggybacking on clickable search engine optimized headlines. In one case cited by Meta researchers, Spamouflage Dragon trolls filled the replies of social media forum questions like “How do I lose belly fat through weight lifting?” with propaganda articles about “Chinese Police Strengthening International Law Enforcement Cooperation.”
They don’t mention what the propagandists push about COVID. The usual line from weirdo propagandists is that COVID is a secret bioweapon and was released from the Wuhan labs intentionally. I assume China wouldn’t sign on to that one? Do they just push the scientific consensus, which is that the origin is unknown but is probably natural, and possibly an unintentional lab leak? Or an exaggeration thereof which completely discounts the lab leak theory but still asserts what is most probable – it’s from animals? That’s pretty weak sauce for propaganda. Maybe they push some nuance about COVID that only the Chinese government cares about. Or maybe they go buck wild and say it was developed by NATO biolabs in Ukraine.
So in the report by Meta, they go into a little more detail. One post in particular claimed that Fort Detrick is the origin of Covid. Fort Detrick is located in Maryland, and a quick google shows that it hasn’t worked on biological weapons since the late 60s.
So basically they tried to do what Russia did but worse
Consensus has always been likely lab leak, higher ups were just covering for fauci and his involvement in funding the lab. And others were silenced by the whole “lab leak theory is racist” mob.
Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? Have yall not been keeping up on the news on the topic. Am I misinformed?
Yes. You are misinformed.
Would… you… mind… sharing your source of information? I don’t recall precisely where I got my information from, but it was definitely along the lines of CNN/MSNBC/NYT and not Breitbart or Trump, jic its that cultural identity that people are downvoting.
Can you give me a source from CNN/MSNBC/NYT where the meat market origin was created to cover up for Fauci? Your entire premise, save the idea that a lab “might” have been the source, is all conspiracy theory and not at all consensus.
The most recent lab leak stuff, as far as I’m aware, which did make the news was a thing published by some federal agency detailing the lab leak. However, what they didn’t (and rarely do) report was that it had a low confidence rating. It was basically them exploring the idea, but they don’t believe that was the cause. Just one possible cause out of many.
I don’t think a possible lab leak has been ruled out, however, my understanding is that we really just don’t know (at least publicly).
I think the downvotes are a reaction to the amount of COVID-19 misinformation that has been pumped out over the years, with the lab leak theory being pushed by people who didn’t even believe in COVID in the first place.
I’ve never understood the resistance to discussing the origins of Covid. It’s pretty important for understanding possible future risks. As far as being racist, I don’t get that either. We have to be able to criticize other nations regardless of who they are. I have a lot of respect for what China has done over the last few decades, it doesn’t mean they might not have screwed up and leaked a deadly disease out of a lab.
The reality is that we’ll probably never know for sure what happened because China blocked anyone else from investigating until long after the fact.
The lab leak theory isn’t racist, but lots of racists really love pushing it. And even if it was true, it wouldn’t mean anything. China was doing research on the viral strains they are most vulnerable to and it got out… so what? It was already in the wild. That’s the point of research.
Now if someone had actual proof it was a bioweapon program, that would be worth talking about, but no one does.
You don’t think that a lab leak might suggest a need for more robust standards at such labs? It’s flawed to suggest that there aren’t differing future mitigation implications depending on how Covid started.
As far as racists clinging to certain theories, that doesn’t preclude rational people from talking about them as well. It’s the same kind of reasoning that produces arguments like, “Well, we can’t criticize Israel, because… Nazis!”
And, frankly, I have always found the idea that Covid started in a wet market much more racially charged than the idea of a lab leak.
The reasoning doesn’t make sense to me on multiple levels.
Even if it was a protocol failure, they’d have fixed it afterwards.
The obsession with the theory with no proof is just conspiracy thinking at best, for what? They’re fucking genociding millions of people as it is, why is a potential accident the issue at hand?
That’s what doesn’t make sense to me.
We have proof of a genocide, but the viral outbreak we’ve known was coming for twenty years is the problem?
Yeah, I just think the resistance to even discussing it is very strange. Not suggesting conspiracy, just good old fashioned human irrationally.
I don’t know why the expectation exists that they should want to build an audience. You don’t need to build an audience to cause chaos. You just need the chaos message to generate enough noise to confuse people.
Or this is just the smoke screen actions and there are much more extensive actions that might actually be working on the rest of the platforms.
Also, Facebook was in bed with Cambridge Analytica, it could be hiding that part.
What ever happened to those Hong Kong protests? I’m assuming they finally got shut down thanks to covid?
The CCP continued to escalate their response until continuing the protest was unfeasible.
This legislation is generally seen as the final nail in the coffin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_national_security_law
Unfortunately they failed to stop the CCP’s National Security Law and the electoral reform which now ensures only “patriots” can run for office (see wiki synopsis). Hong Kong, in a political sense, is now only nominally separate from China. Such a heart-breaking loss.
Everyone interferes with our election cause we’ve let our citizens become dumb as fucking rocks.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta on Tuesday outed the authors of a four-year long influence campaign dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon,” which first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
Federal prosecutors accused dozens of Chinese Ministry of Public Security officials of being behind a covert social media propaganda campaign in a criminal complaint filed in April.
In one video posted by the trolls, narrators urged viewers “not to vote for someone” and showed footage of January 6 rioters while claiming that “The solution is to root out this ineffective and incapacitated system.”
At other times, the spammers attempted to push niche and esoteric Chinese propaganda talking points onto unreceptive audiences by piggybacking on clickable search engine optimized headlines.
In one case cited by Meta researchers, Spamouflage Dragon trolls filled the replies of social media forum questions like “How do I lose belly fat through weight lifting?” with propaganda articles about “Chinese Police Strengthening International Law Enforcement Cooperation.”
The campaign’s lack of any audience development despite years of operation, dozens of personnel behind it, and thousands of pieces of content leads some to wonder why China even bothers with the trolling effort.
The original article contains 740 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Not to mention all the Fentanyl precursors China has been pumping into other countries.
Reverse opium wars
There was so much of this around the “weather balloons” as well.
💀
They believed the Gov. was about to expose their collusion in it, is my bet. An attempt to get ahead of the issue unlike in 2016.
There’s no guilt implied for Facebook when bad actors use the service in coordinated ways.
If my uncle can post crazy shit to Facebook, so can seemingly-random groups of people.
They’re not guilty for the things their users do. Bad actors are all over Facebook, so revealing a government was using their platform for nefarious purposes is more like, “See? We can be good guys, too!” It’s positive PR to be proactive like that.
If you take them at their word, they didn’t realize the efforts were connected to the CCP. Which, since CCP is somewhat competent at online harassment, is believable.
No shit.
first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
I’ve lived in HK; what propaganda was this now?
So, almost nothing about “election” save what’s in the excerpt? Clickbaity.
