Meta Finds Relations Between Operations Influence "Spamouflage" And Chinese Law Enforcement

JAKARTA - Meta Platform Inc., Facebook's parent company, announced on Tuesday 29 August that it had found links between individuals linked to Chinese law enforcement and long-running "Spaceuflage" influence operations but largely pro-China ineffective.

The social media network removed about 7,700 Facebook accounts and hundreds of pages, groups and other Instagram accounts connected to the campaign, elements of the campaign have been active since 2018, as explained in a quarterly security report.

The "Spaceuflage" network has been active in recent years by encouraging positive narratives about China and negative comments about the United States, Western foreign policy, and Chinese government critics.

With the latest activity detected, executives in Meta revealed that they believe that "Spacemouflage" has been the largest cross-platform influence operation known to date, with attendance at at at least 50 services.

The fake account cluster of the campaign is run from various parts of China, but shares digital infrastructure and appears to be operating with a clear schedule, including a break for lunch and dinner in Beijing time, as Meta explains.

The "Spamouflage" network initially started posting on major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, now called X. Recent activity shows that the network has expanded its scope to include smaller platforms such as Medium, Reddit, Quora, and Vimeo, according to the company's statement.

They collected about 560,000 followers for their pages on Facebook, but Meta executives revealed that they believed most of the accounts were fake and had been purchased from commercial spam operators in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh. They said they saw little evidence of the original audience or involvement beyond that.

"This operation is big and noisy, but is struggling to reach more of its own fake ecospace," said Ben Nimmo, Meta's Head of Global Threat Intelligence.

In one case reflecting the background of the spam accounts, a Facebook page that had previously posted Chinese-language ads about underwear suddenly switched to writing English posts about riots in Kazakhstan, Nimmo said.