A few weeks before the mid-term elections in the United States, and with the bad record of the elections that brought Donald Trump to the White House, the companies behind the social networks have fine-tuned their processes in search of propaganda operations and fake news.
One of the most criticized had been Facebook, now Meta, for which Mark Zuckerberg’s company is one of the most trying to show its interest in deactivating any campaign in this regard.
This Tuesday, September 27, Meta Platforms announced it has disrupted what it believes is the first influence operation targeting users in the United States in connection with the November 2022 election.
As revealed by Meta, the base of the activity was in China and sought, with political content, to dilute the scenario prior to the mid-term elections.
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior From China and Russia https://t.co/CH4i5Gpu56
— MetaNewsroom (@MetaNewsroom) September 27, 2022
Facebook and fake accounts operating from China
According to Meta, it was a network made up of dozens of false accounts distributed on the company’s social networks, Facebook and Instagram.
Also had Twitter activity.
Facebook says the campaign orchestrated from China “it was still small” and “didn’t attract many followers”.
However, the Meta Platforms report says that it is a “significant discovery” since it shows that there is an attempt to interfere in the internal politics of the United States.
The difference with previous campaigns of this nature, according to Meta, is that this China-based operation sought to directly influence elections by speaking to the citizens of that country.
Before, the found propaganda campaigns aimed to speak ill of the United States in the rest of the world, mainly in South Asia.
In a conference with the media, Meta’s Director of Global Threat Intelligence, Ben Nimmo, said that “Essentially, the messages we disabled said ‘America is bad, and China is good.'”
According to Meta, there were also messages directed at Americans related to issues that divide society, such as abortion and the right to bear arms.
According to what was released by Zuckerberg’s social network, The fake accounts posed as liberal and conservative Americans in different states, posting memes and lurking in the comments of public figures’ posts since November 2021.
Separately, another Facebook intelligence report says it uncovered and disabled an operation run from Russia to influence the war with Ukraine.
Meta describes it as “an expanding network of more than 60 websites, social media accounts, and petition sites.”
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