China targeted Aussies in ‘largest ever’ influence op

Facebook parent Meta says the biggest digital influence campaign it has ever disrupted was launched from little-known websites and targeted Australia.

The “largest ever” covert digital influence operation caught by Facebook was launched by groups connected to the Chinese Communist Party and targeted Australians from obscure websites.

A new “Adversarial Threat Report” released by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, revealed a sprawling network of “spamouflage” accounts posting pro-China propaganda across social media networks that were linked to a single operation orchestrated by Beijing.

As YouTube, Twitter (now X), TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram began identifying and removing tens of thousands of spamouflaged propaganda posts in the past four years, the groups linked to “Chinese law enforcement” shifted to more obscure sites in smaller countries in an attempt to slip through the back door.

“So rather than starting off on Facebook, it will post an article on a small forum in Nigeria or in Australia, and then it will start trying to share the link to that article on the larger platforms,” said Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead.

Meta linked a massive troll network to “Chinese law enforcement”, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party and it’s Chairman Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

“It’s putting itself into these smaller and smaller buckets and then trying to reach out of there,” he added to National Public Radio, an American media outlet.

One example listed in the report, developed in partnership with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute was forum Melbournechinese.net, which publishes miscellaneous Australian news stories in Mandarin.

In the past quarter, Meta removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts for violating its policy against co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour.

“This network originated in China and targeted many regions around the world, including Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and global Chinese-speaking audiences,” the report said.

The network of fake accounts posted a large number of unique headlines created by a central co-ordinating body across a network of about 50 websites using “spamoflauge”, a technique to disguise political posts amid a series of random videos and pictures that appear to be spam.

The headlines spread pro-Chinese messages, like support of its handling of COVID-19, and attacked critics of Beijing, including pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and the Trump administration and its tariffs.

One cluster of China-linked trolls implicated former British Prime Minister Liz Truss in the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Another post had the headline: “The reasons of Australia’s sudden suspension of Chinese TV shows”.

In 2021, SBS said it would suspend broadcasts of news from Chinese state television news services CGTN and CCTV after receiving a human rights complaint from Safeguard Defenders.

“This is classic political persecution,” China’s foreign ministry in a statement to Reuters, while urging “relevant parties to cast aside their ideological prejudice.”

The human rights group, Safeguards Defenders, was subject to a focus of the covert digital influence operation, with headlines from the CCP-linked network including: “Lying through his teeth to Safeguard Defenders”, “Frequently slandering other countries -- revealing the so-called ‘human rights organisation’ -- Safeguard Defenders, “Safeguard Defenders” -Serious ‘Double Standards’, and so on.

After Facbook began removing Chinese propoganda, the troll farm switched to lesser-known sites in countries like Australia Picture: AFP

Other than in Australia, the spam was seeded on other small sites in countries like Nigeria (Nairaland.com), Indonesia (kaskus.co), and the financial forum nanyangmoney.com.

The posts targeting Chinese dissidents, and promoting the regime of Chairman Xi Jinping, floated up from these minor forums to larger sites, which also include Reddit, Medium and Quora.

“It is the largest covert influence operation that’s currently active in the world today,” Nimmo told Politico.

“Pick a place on the internet, and they’re probably trying to go there to spread effectively a fairly simple set of messages that praise China and criticise the United States and Western foreign policies.”

Originally published as China targeted Aussies in ‘largest ever’ influence op