What does Meta (Facebook) do against Chinese fake accounts
Meta is eliminating more and more fake accounts that carry out propaganda activities.
Under the blaze of global criticism, and even in the face of doubts from Facebook and Instagram employees, Facebook's parent company Meta is cutting more and more accounts with proven artificial activities, under the label "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
In fact, Meta claims in his latest report that he acted in Palestine, Poland, Belarus and finally in China against politically targeted disinformation networks.
The most striking example concerns a network of over 500 accounts, 4 Facebook groups and 86 Instagram accounts, discovered in China and managed by employees of Chinese civil engineering companies on four different continents. Links have been established with the Sichuan Silence Information Technology Company, a cybersecurity company associated with the Chinese state.
This ecosystem has tried to amplify the circulation of the publications of a Swiss biologist, a certain Wilson Edwards. On the networks, Wilson Edwards said the Americans were lobbying the World Health Organization to abandon a report that dismissed the Wuhan lab track as a source of the coronavirus.
Covered in Chinese propaganda newspapers such as Global Times and People's Daily , Wilson Edwards' publications accused the United States of exerting "immense pressure" and intimidating "research colleagues".
The problem is, Wilson Edwards doesn't exist. The creation of his account dates back to July 24, two days after China rejected an in-depth investigation plan into the origins of Covid-19 within the WHO.
Ten hours after its creation, the account had already published a long text that would soon provide the content of the articles in the Global Times .
Meta also indicates that Wilson Edwards' Facebook profile has been enriched with computer maneuvers to provide him with a credible identity, creating fake publications dating back to before the actual account creation.
If the influence operation was described as failure by Meta, due to the amateurism of amplifiers and the absence of a true community, the company says it needs the help of the Swiss embassy in China to determine that Wilson Edwards does not existed. Is this then a success on the part of Meta or a failure with respect to the effective and widespread information warfare put in place by China?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/meta-account-cina/ on Fri, 17 Dec 2021 06:52:37 +0000.