He created 7,704 suspicious accounts, 990 Facebook pages, 15 groups and 15 Instagram accounts. They were all linked to Chinese law enforcement and ran what the company calls “the largest known cross-platform covert penetration operation in the world.”

What is known about the scope of their activities

Accounts with generally positive comments about Chinese politics and negative posts about the United States, He was also active on Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Medium, Soundcloud, Pinterest and 50+ online platforms. forums, according to Meta’s second-quarter hostile threat report.

Influence operations were traced to a collection of geographically distributed accounts in China that received content from a single central source. The content consisted mostly of spam links, political memes, and text posts; all of which aimed to improve China’s image, particularly in Xinjiang province, and to criticize Western foreign policy. Xinjiang is the region where human rights organizations face the most pressure.Especially against the Uyghur Muslim minority in the country.

Bot posts differed in content and quality; most of them contained minor errors while others were a complete mess. Many recurring headlines that Meta has identified suggest that pro-Chinese accounts are trying to cast doubt on the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, with some even suggesting that the United States may be the real culprit. “The truth is Fort Detrick is where COVID-19 originated”, – says one of the posts. Fort Detrick is a US military base in Maryland. Another post, translated into eight languages, attempts to link the outbreak to a “suspicious” shipment of seafood from the United States.

Most of the posts were directed at specific individuals, including not just politicians but also virology scientists.

• meta says the campaign did not achieve significant success. Most of the pages were deleted by automatic monitoring systems without gaining subscribers.
• Operators involved in the operation spent only $3,500 on Facebook ads, mostly in Chinese yuan, Hong Kong dollars and US dollars.
• They tried to get out of the bubble they were in, but they couldn’t.
• The pages did not cover their tracks very well. Many of the discovered posts tried to use “I” or “we” to appear more personal and persuasive, but the same posts continued to be copied across hundreds of different accounts on different platforms. In some cases, Meta claims to have detected posts that look like serial numbers, claiming that accounts are instructed to copy and paste content from a numbered list.

Thanks to advanced surveillance techniques, Meta was able to detect and block this spam network on their platform. Other companies do not have such advanced facilities. And some, like Elon Musk in his X, will deliberately never do it.