Topline
Facebook on Tuesday said it shut down 155 fake accounts it determined were run from China, including accounts posting about the U.S. presidential election.
Key Facts
In the U.S., where he said the “network focused the least and gained almost no following” the accounts posted content both in support of and against presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
About 133,000 accounts followed one or more of the pages, around 61,000 people joined one or more of the groups and about 150 accounts followed one or more of these Instagram accounts.
Gleicher said Facebook found the network as part of an internal investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region and found links to individuals in the Fujian province of China focused primarily on the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly, and also on the U.S.
In Southeast Asia, the network focused most of its activity on global news and current events including content supportive of Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter Sarah Duterte’s potential run in the 2022 presidential election and issues relevant to the overseas Filipino workers.
Key Background
Graphika, a social media analytics company commissioned by Facebook to study the network of accounts, wrote in a report Tuesday that the operation began in late 2016 by posting about Taiwan and, in early 2018, started posting about the Philippines, with content that supported President Rodrigo Duterte and argued in favor of Chinese regional influence. Around the same time, it created pages focused more broadly on the South China Sea and defended China’s policies there. For a few months in late 2018, one page began posting in support of President Joko Widodo in Indonesia, shortly before Indonesia’s presidential election. In 2019 and 2020, the network started running accounts that posed as Americans and posted a small amount of content about the U.S. presidential election. Different assets supported President Donald Trump and his Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden while one group supported former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Graphika said the operation did not single out either candidate for preferential treatment and that many of the accounts in this phase were barely active.
Further Reading
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (Facebook Announcement)
Facebook Takes Down Inauthentic Chinese Network (Graphika Report)