On Tuesday, August 29, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced the partial dismantling of a network disseminating false information and propaganda on behalf of China. "Taking their activity altogether across the internet, we assess it's the largest and most prolific influence campaign operation that we know in the world today," said Ben Nimmo, one of the group's managers in charge of combating disinformation operations.

Part of this campaign had already been spotted by researchers at the end of 2019 and dubbed Spamouflage, due to its propensity to massively spread messages and links. On Facebook, Meta's security teams identified 7,704 accounts, 954 pages and 15 groups linked to this campaign, as well as 15 accounts on Instagram. These are very large numbers compared with the campaigns usually detected by the company, which only occasionally exceed a thousand accounts.

The main aim of this network was to disseminate "positive commentary about China and its province Xinjiang [where the Uyghur minority is persecuted] and criticisms of the US, Western foreign policies and critics of the Chinese government including journalists and researchers," according to Meta.

The company attributes the campaign to "individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement," without giving any further details. The researchers note that Spamouflage had extensive resources, both material and human, and operated with several "units," each of which controlled a group of fake accounts and published messages at times corresponding to office hours in the various Chinese time zones.

This highly productive campaign seems, according to Meta, to have favored quantity over quality. While the network's accounts had accumulated some 560,000 subscribers, they generated very few comments, likes or shares from real user accounts, the company asserts. This lack of effectiveness is common in disinformation operations of this type, and can also be explained in part by the poor quality control of the messages published and the accounts created.

"Many of Spamouflage's accounts and pages appear to have been purchased from third parties in other countries, notably Vietnam and Bangladesh," writes Meta, adding, "The operators often appear to have begun using these accounts and pages without making any alterations – leading to highly idiosyncratic behaviors where, for example, a page that had been posting lingerie ads in Chinese abruptly switched to English and posted organic content about riots in Kazakhstan."

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