Chinese Intel Officers Interfered in U.S. Election
Chinese Intel Officers Interfered in U.S. Election
An influence operation spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s democracy movement, Covid-19’s origins, and the U.S. midterm elections
China is behind the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on Facebook and Instagram, according to a new report by security researchers at Meta.
Meta on Tuesday outed the authors of a four-year long influence campaign dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon,” which first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Since then, the campaign has focused on spreading disinformation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, attacking dissidents and critics abroad, criticizing the United States, and attempting to sow division during the 2022 midterm elections.
For years, researchers have speculated that the voluminous Spamouflage Dragon posts were connected to the Chinese government but have been unable to publicly prove a link until now. The link comes courtesy of overlapping content found in both Meta’s report and charges filed against Chinese intelligence operatives back in spring.
I'll assume there is a long list of influential Americans that got paid.
63maybe a short list of people running social media platforms, getting paid under the table
9I hope you aren't implying that the company that released this report linking spam to the Chinese government is actually taking bribes from the Chinese government, because that would just be silly lol.
If you mean other platforms like Reddit and Twitter... maybe, but I still think it's unlikely. I'm sure it's a lot cheaper to let accounts be blocked and create new spam accounts than to actually pay off platforms to let those spam accounts exist, especially because moderation on social media platforms has always been a very difficult thing to get right.
3
Look to every freshly elected Republican member of the 118th Congress that are doing everything they can to destroy America's economy.
4Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. A lot of these people are very stupid.
1
So apparently they really suck at it? That's kind of hilarious
The trolls have demonstrated a weak command of idiomatic English with articles that, while prolific, often misspell key names or use English and Mandarin interchangeably. Other posts — like a critique of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 trip to Taiwan — appear long after the events they purported to preview.
At other times, the spammers attempted to push niche and esoteric Chinese propaganda talking points onto unreceptive audiences by piggybacking on clickable search engine optimized headlines. In one case cited by Meta researchers, Spamouflage Dragon trolls filled the replies of social media forum questions like “How do I lose belly fat through weight lifting?” with propaganda articles about “Chinese Police Strengthening International Law Enforcement Cooperation.”
They don't mention what the propagandists push about COVID. The usual line from weirdo propagandists is that COVID is a secret bioweapon and was released from the Wuhan labs intentionally. I assume China wouldn't sign on to that one? Do they just push the scientific consensus, which is that the origin is unknown but is probably natural, and possibly an unintentional lab leak? Or an exaggeration thereof which completely discounts the lab leak theory but still asserts what is most probable -- it's from animals? That's pretty weak sauce for propaganda. Maybe they push some nuance about COVID that only the Chinese government cares about. Or maybe they go buck wild and say it was developed by NATO biolabs in Ukraine.
44So in the report by Meta, they go into a little more detail. One post in particular claimed that Fort Detrick is the origin of Covid. Fort Detrick is located in Maryland, and a quick google shows that it hasn't worked on biological weapons since the late 60s.
23So basically they tried to do what Russia did but worse
10Idk if this is propaganda or just some fucking idiot online LMAO
I don't imagine that the boss of whoever would be responsible for this supposed project would look at the responses and go "yep, looks about right"
It's not like being bilingual is that rare in intelligence positions in China. The evidence for being state-sponsored is weak.
0Consensus has always been likely lab leak,higher ups were just covering for fauci and his involvement in funding the lab. And others were silenced by the whole “lab leak theory is racist” mob.Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? Have yall not been keeping up on the news on the topic. Am I misinformed?
-44What you should have posted was nothing.
1I've never understood the resistance to discussing the origins of Covid. It's pretty important for understanding possible future risks. As far as being racist, I don't get that either. We have to be able to criticize other nations regardless of who they are. I have a lot of respect for what China has done over the last few decades, it doesn't mean they might not have screwed up and leaked a deadly disease out of a lab.
The reality is that we'll probably never know for sure what happened because China blocked anyone else from investigating until long after the fact.
1
Everyone interferes with our election cause we've let our citizens become dumb as fucking rocks.
40We didn't just let it happen, we made it happen.
9
I don't know why the expectation exists that they should want to build an audience. You don't need to build an audience to cause chaos. You just need the chaos message to generate enough noise to confuse people.
23Or this is just the smoke screen actions and there are much more extensive actions that might actually be working on the rest of the platforms.
5Permanently Deleted
2
Half a million people is a drop in the market by almost any measure.
Put it this way: if you had half a million followers on TikTok, would you be happy? Not really.
0Except they're not trying to monetize, so they don't care. They're trying to encourage disruption, which even one unstable individual can go out and do.
Given how close some of our recent elections have been, and in the closest one, how different the very straight-laced Al Gore and more cowboy/frat boy George W were, it doesn't take many people to create a huge shift in how our country approaches things for a period of time.
One of the two rejected global warming, the other made a documentary about it, as an example of how different the candidates were.
1
Not to mention all the Fentanyl precursors China has been pumping into other countries.
9Reverse opium wars
8
What ever happened to those Hong Kong protests? I’m assuming they finally got shut down thanks to covid?
8Unfortunately they failed to stop the CCP’s National Security Law and the electoral reform which now ensures only “patriots” can run for office (see wiki synopsis). Hong Kong, in a political sense, is now only nominally separate from China. Such a heart-breaking loss.
13The CCP continued to escalate their response until continuing the protest was unfeasible.
This legislation is generally seen as the final nail in the coffin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_national_security_law
11
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta on Tuesday outed the authors of a four-year long influence campaign dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon,” which first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
Federal prosecutors accused dozens of Chinese Ministry of Public Security officials of being behind a covert social media propaganda campaign in a criminal complaint filed in April.
In one video posted by the trolls, narrators urged viewers “not to vote for someone” and showed footage of January 6 rioters while claiming that “The solution is to root out this ineffective and incapacitated system.”
At other times, the spammers attempted to push niche and esoteric Chinese propaganda talking points onto unreceptive audiences by piggybacking on clickable search engine optimized headlines.
In one case cited by Meta researchers, Spamouflage Dragon trolls filled the replies of social media forum questions like “How do I lose belly fat through weight lifting?” with propaganda articles about “Chinese Police Strengthening International Law Enforcement Cooperation.”
The campaign’s lack of any audience development despite years of operation, dozens of personnel behind it, and thousands of pieces of content leads some to wonder why China even bothers with the trolling effort.
The original article contains 740 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
6Permanently Deleted
1
Oh no really...
5Anyway
3
Since the article didn't link the report, I have it attached here: https://transparency.fb.com/integrity-reports-q2-2023/
As we always should do with these reports, let's question the source:
-
The lead author is Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow for Atlantic Council. According to testimony, "the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and [others] all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks." According to this internal CIA memo (accessible via FOIA), Atlantic Council fellows are almost all controlled by various US intelligence agencies and report to the director of the CIA.
-
Ben Nimmo's track record of identifying state-sponsored misinformation is spotty at best. A few years ago, the DFR wrote a hit piece that implicated Ian Shilling (a British retiree) as a Russian bot disinformation account. This led to the takedown of his account by Twitter... Which was rolled back soon after after he went to the news... He was then suspended under X, so go him I guess.
-
Looking at the authors, we have Ben Nimmo (discussed above), Mike Torrey (previous NSA and CIA analyst), Margarita Franklin (has conspicuous 3 year gap between her masters graduation and her first job, quickly rising to the role of Director... which could be a coincidence), David Agranovich (ex-DOD, ex-National Security Council), and Margie Milam/Lindsay Hundley/Robert Claim (for all intents and purposes legitimate people focusing on IP and DNS). Given the large number of actual, non-government-affiliated cybersecurity researchers, the prevalence of ex-US intelligence on this report is rather startling.
Overall, there's a stronger claim for this being US propaganda (as shown above) than there is for some barely-intelligible sentences that look like they were written literally by idiots being Chinese propaganda... But who knows, maybe they're both propaganda?
4Overall, there’s a stronger claim for this being US propaganda
Why would the US want to cast doubt on their own voting system? Chinese interference or otherwise
9It's copium from whatever of the two parties is less popular at the time.
0I'm saying the report is US propaganda, not the disinformation. The US needs a bogeyman, and it can't be "some idiots in their mom's basement"
I've edited the original post to clarify.
-1Red Scare propaganda to manufacture public consent for war with Russia and China
-8
I am really glad you said this, even reading the first half of this I was ready to believe the headline/report to be true.
0
-
💀
4They believed the Gov. was about to expose their collusion in it, is my bet. An attempt to get ahead of the issue unlike in 2016.
4There's no guilt implied for Facebook when bad actors use the service in coordinated ways.
If my uncle can post crazy shit to Facebook, so can seemingly-random groups of people.
3They're not guilty for the things their users do. Bad actors are all over Facebook, so revealing a government was using their platform for nefarious purposes is more like, "See? We can be good guys, too!" It's positive PR to be proactive like that.
3If you take them at their word, they didn't realize the efforts were connected to the CCP. Which, since CCP is somewhat competent at online harassment, is believable.
2
Next time buy AMD...
I'll shut the door on my way out.
4I wanted to make AMD joke
3
No shit.
3There was so much of this around the "weather balloons" as well.
2You'd think they would at least cite the report from Meta... RollingStone is back at it with their top tier journalism.
2So, almost nothing about “election” save what’s in the excerpt? Clickbaity.
2first appeared in 2019 to spread propaganda about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
I've lived in HK; what propaganda was this now?
-2You mean... People are jerking off by posting stupid bullshit online during work hours? No way!
Must be a state sponsored mission man.
China's intelligence apparatus isn't stupid and they do possess basic technologies líke machine translation (which has gotten really good nowadays).
-2fuck you talkin bout. ain’t no chinese gon figure shit like this comment if they ain’t american, ya feel?
1