Meta says Chinese, Russian influence operations are among the biggest it's taken down
NPR Online NewsAug 29, 2023
Facebook's parent company Meta announced Tuesday that it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups, and 15 Instagram accounts linked to a Chinese influence campaign targeting the US, Taiwan, the UK, and other countries.
The operation, which initially focused on discrediting the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong before shifting to COVID-related material, was first discovered in 2019. The company has since repeatedly spotted and removed recurring spam accounts.
This is a big win for America in the fight against foreign authoritarian propaganda campaigns. Countries like China and Russia are increasingly using Western-based social media platforms to insert upbeat messages about their own governments while sowing doubt about the democratic institutions of the West. This will be an indefinite fight against Beijing and Moscow, which means platforms like Meta must continuously improve their propaganda detection and removal mechanisms.
The US government has used certain atrocities committed by Beijing to blur the lines between being against war with China and in favor of its social policies. Just as McCarthyites did to anti-nuclear war activists during the Cold War, today, the media and government are working in tandem to paint anyone who wishes to avoid a world war as China apologist. The propaganda is just as strong in the West, and arguably even worse since its goal is to prop up a rampant military-industrial complex. So any panic over "influence campaigns" must be taken with a grain of salt.
There is a 20% chance there will be a US-China war before 2035, according to the Metaculus prediction community.