Meta removes Chinese propaganda operation targeting US midterms: Report

Meta Platforms said on Tuesday that it had identified and taken down two separate propaganda networks backed by China and Russia which were targeting users with political content ahead of the US midterm elections.

The tech giant said that for violating its policy against “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” the “covert influence operations” had been taken down. 

China

According to the report, the Chinese network targeted the United States, Czech Republic as well as Chinese and French-speaking audiences across the world. It was active from sometime in the autumn of 2021 to mid-September in 2022.

Meta said that this particular attempt did not garner much traffic and was also called out as being fake. It added that the operation was across Meta’s different platforms like Instagram and Facebook. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company said that this was the first Chinese network that it had disrupted which was focused on US midterms. 

Russia

The company formerly known as Facebook pointed out that it had identified a network that originated in Russia and was targeting Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom as well as Ukraine. The operation was primarily to target the countries with alternative narratives focused on the war in Ukraine. 

Meta said that the operation began in May this year and consisted of a series of 60 websites that were designed to emulate existing news websites like The Guardian, Spiegel and Bild. The people on the network would post articles that were supportive of Russia and critical of the sanctions on the world’s largest country arguing that they would backfire. 

These articles would then be promoted across different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram. The report concludes that the Russian network was the “largest and most complex Russian-origin operation” that the company had “disrupted since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.”