The research underscores how online platforms based in the United States still struggle to police inauthentic behavior abroad.
“Kenyan Twitter was awash in Pandora Paper astroturfing,” he said. “Like clockwork, an alternative sentiment quickly emerged, supporting the president and his offshore accounts,” said Odanga Madung, a fellow at Mozilla and an author of the report. vaccines have side effects,” the post said. “Many countries buy Chinese vaccines first, U.S. In January, according to Miburo’s report, a Facebook user linked to a YouTube video that spread propaganda about coronavirus vaccines. The network got little engagement on the platform, and a handful of accounts spotted by Miburo were false positives, the company said. Margarita Franklin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said the company would continue to work with researchers to detect and block the attempts of networks “to come back, like some of the accounts mentioned in this report.”įacebook said that while some of the accounts flagged by Miburo resembled the behavior of Spamouflage, it could not yet confirm their connection to the network without more research. Twitter said it had permanently suspended a number of accounts based on Miburo’s report under its platform manipulation and spam policy. He said that most of the channels had uploaded “spammy content” that had generated most of the views and that “a very small subset uploaded content in Chinese and English about China’s Covid-19 vaccine efforts and social issues in the U.S.” All were removed after the researchers sent their data set to YouTube.įarshad Shadloo, a YouTube spokesman, said the channels were terminated in the last month as part of YouTube’s continuing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China. In early December, 287 YouTube channels spreading the Chinese propaganda were still up, Mr. The researchers also found 1,632 accounts in the network on Facebook, including some accounts that used fake profile photos generated with the help of artificial intelligence and Bangladeshi Facebook pages that later changed their names and started to post about China. Miburo found nearly 8,000 YouTube videos in the network in the past year that collected over 3.6 million views, and links to the videos were posted on both Facebook and Twitter. Though some posts have since been removed, Miburo tracked around 2,000 more accounts that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter failed to remove, from January 2021 to this month. Miburo said the network, nicknamed “Spamouflage” by researchers, was first discovered by the research group Graphika in a 2019 report. This week, The Times reported on a set of documents that showed how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate propaganda on demand. In June, The New York Times and ProPublica revealed the existence of thousands of videos orchestrated by the Chinese government in which citizens denied abuses in Xinjiang. Monaco said in a blog post about the campaign.Ĭhina is known to use social media to broadcast its political messages with the aim of shaping global opinion. But “ knowing who pressed the enter key is less important” than the implication of a well-known actor spreading Chinese propaganda “at a high volume on international social media networks,” Mr. Miburo said it was difficult to determine whether the influence campaign was organized by the ruling Communist Party or if some accounts were by nationalist citizens. He added that the timing and messaging of the posts in the network aligned perfectly with public messaging put out by the Chinese government in the last year. The accounts point to a “well-resourced, high-skill actor that keeps reappearing,” said Nick Monaco, the director of China research at Miburo.