Meta disinformation agents declare win against Chinese disinformation

Intelligence operatives at Meta responsible for sowing disinformation online are claiming to have taken down a massive Chinese disinformation operation which they have declared “the largest in the world.”

Meta’s recently published Adversarial Threat Report for the second quarter details the company’s removal of thousands of Facebook accounts linked to “Spamouflage”, a large-scale Chinese propaganda operation stretching back to 2019. 

According to the report, Spamouflage operatives disseminated pro-China propaganda across more than 50 forums and platforms, including Facebook. The content included “positive commentary about China and its province Xinjiang and criticisms of the United States, Western foreign policies, and critics of the Chinese government including journalists and researchers.”

In the report, Meta boasts removing 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 pages, 15 groups and 15 Instagram accounts reportedly linked to the Spamouflage operation—not because the content was necessarily false, but because they violated Meta’s “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policy.

“Coordinated inauthentic behavior is when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing,” explains Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in a video. “The posts themselves may not be false and may not go against our community standards,” he adds.

Meta’s report was led by Global Threat Intelligence Lead Ben Nimmo, an intelligence operative known for his major role in suppressing information under the pretext of “disinformation”.

Nimmo previously served in NATO information operations and later obtained a senior fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a “think tank” whose board contains several former CIA directors and  other high-level intelligence officials. According to congressional testimony from investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger earlier this year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) is “one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions in the world.”

The Atlantic Council has been serving as a coordinating hub between tech giants and the State Department to censor undesirable political views in the US and Europe. In 2018 Facebook announced an “election partnership” with the Atlantic Council and authorized it to declare which Facebook accounts and posts were “election misinformation”.

After Nimmo served as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab in the United Kingdom, he was hired as head of investigations at Graphika, a private network analysis firm funded by the US government. Specifically, Graphika has received grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Department's Minerva Initiative, a program focused on psychological warfare.

Nimmo has been responsible for suppressing several accounts from social media after accusing them of being foreign disinformation. In 2018 Nimmo reported Ian56, an anonymous account on Twitter espousing populist anti-war views, as a “Russian disinformation bot”. Despite being a real-life British retiree, Ian56 was removed. 

The next year, when the UK’s then-Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed scandalous documents involving the country’s National Health Service (NHS), Nimmo immediately announced that Corbyn’s papers “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.” Following this pronouncement, news media placed more emphasis on Corbyn’s “links to the Kremlin” than on the attempted privatization of the NHS by the British and American governments.

Meta’s report was also signed by Threat Disruption Director David Agranovich, another high-level intelligence operative. Agranovich, who currently serves as a Global Shaper for the World Economic Forum (WEF), came to Facebook in 2018 after being the White House National Security Council Director for Intelligence.

The “Spamouflage” takedown comes amid a years-long spat between Chinese officials and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the Facebook founder’s efforts to market his products in China were blocked.

In 2009 China banned Facebook, Twitter, and Google after they were used by anti-government activists during riots in the Xinjiang province. Zuckerberg spent years thereafter heavily courting officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reconsider. When Zuckerberg visited China in 2015, he bragged to then-Cyberspace Administration Minister Lu Wei that he regularly gifts his colleagues copies of China President Xi Jinping’s book “to let them know the characteristics of Chinese socialism.”

But Wei was later imprisoned for corruption and Zuckerberg’s entreaties were ultimately rebuffed. When Zuckerberg tried opening a Facebook subsidiary in Hangzhou in 2018, Chinese officials withdrew government approval for the office. 

Instead, China’s government opted to use its own social media platforms, like WeChat. Zuckerberg later took a hard line on China, slamming the CCP’s suppression of information. The billionaire has come down especially hard on Chinese-owned TikTok which remains one of Facebook’s chief rivals.

Nevertheless, Zuckerberg this year tried teaming up with Chinese tech firm Tencent to distribute Meta’s virtual reality headsets in China, which earned the billionaire a public rebuke from Chinese state media.