Meta purged thousands of Facebook accounts that it claims were connected to a widespread Chinese spam operation designed to promote China and slam the West.

The social media giant announced on Tuesday that it had removed more than 7,700 Facebook accounts and 15 Instagram accounts that were part of a campaign known as "Spamouflage." This campaign, which spanned across a multitude of social networks, aimed to post praise for China and attacks on the United States as well as critics of China.

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"We assess that it's the largest, though unsuccessful, and most prolific covert influence operation that we know of in the world today," Meta Global Threat Intelligence Lead Ben Nimmo said in a statement. "And we've been able to link Spamouflage to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement."

The operation originated in China but targeted Taiwan, the U.S., Australia, Britain, Japan, and other Chinese-speaking audiences. The group's pages were taken down due to violating Meta's rules around coordinated deceptive behavior.

While the network was fairly extensive, Meta notes that it received very little attention beyond comments challenging their claims. The network acquired about 560,000 accounts for its pages on Facebook, but executives believe the accounts were primarily fakes purchased from spam operators in Vietnam and Bangladesh.

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Some of the tactics reported resembled those of a Russian online deception network exposed in 2019, according to Nimmo. This led the Meta executive to surmise that the two countries may be learning from one another.

Meta also noted its analysis of the Russian influence campaign identified as Doppelganger, which attempted to mimic the websites of news sources. Doppelganger intended to publish false information to convince the public to lose faith in its support of Ukraine.