Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it had deleted thousands of accounts on the social network that were part of a major Chinese online propaganda operation, Reuters and Agerpres reported.

According to a report published by Meta, the campaign was active on more than fifty platforms and forums, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube or Twitter (renamed X).

“We believe this is the largest — albeit ineffective — and most prolific influence operation we’ve seen to date,” said Ben Nimmo, head of the US giant’s global threat intelligence unit.

According to him, the Meta teams also managed to “expose individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement.” More than 7,700 Facebook accounts were affected, along with 15 Instagram accounts, making it the largest account deletion operation ever, Meta reported.

The group’s security teams were able to determine that these accounts were linked to a series of spam activities (unsolicited messages) that had been taking place since 2019 and were terminated by Meta.

“For the first time, we have been able to link these series and confirm that they are part of the same operation,” Nimmo added.

How the propaganda network of Chinese social networks worked

The exposed network regularly publishes positive comments about China and Xinjiang province, where the Uyghur minority is subject to mass persecution. Meanwhile, accounts belonging to the network criticized the United States, Western foreign policy and those attacking the Chinese government, “including journalists and researchers,” the report said.

The network was based in China and targeted Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan, as well as Chinese-speaking audiences overseas.

The accounts and pages in question were removed for violating the group’s terms of use for the platforms, but appeared to have a small audience and comments mostly reporting false allegations. The accounts were linked to various locations in China, and the pace of activity seemed to coincide with business hours.

The operation also relied heavily on Medium, Reddit, X, Youtube, Soundcloud and Vimeo, according to Meta’s threat protection team.

Meta says Russia and China inspire each other when it comes to disinformation

According to Ben Nimmo, some of the tactics used were also similar to those of the Russian network discovered in 2019, which seemed to emphasize that these operations are learning from each other.

Meta Report also analyzed a campaign called “Doppelganger” discovered a year ago by its teams. The gist of the operation was to make copies, “doppelgangers” in English, of major media sites in Europe to publish fake news about the war in Ukraine and then distribute it online, said Meta’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.

The companies involved in this campaign, which initially targeted mainly Germany, France and Ukraine, and then the United States and Israel, were recently sanctioned by the European Union.

“We managed to block their operational resources on our platforms, but the sites are still active,” Gleicher warned. According to him, this is the largest and most progressive operation of Russian influence in 2017.