Meta removes thousands of Facebook accounts posing as US citizens
Peter Cordi
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Meta announced Thursday that it removed thousands of Chinese Facebook accounts posing as American citizens to promulgate polarizing political content online and targeting both sides of the political spectrum.
The parent company of Facebook explained its efforts to kill off the accounts before they started to gain organic traction in its Q3 Adversarial Threat report. Meta additionally shed light on the danger presented by foreign political campaigns, especially as election season gets underway.
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“Foreign threat actors are attempting to reach people across the internet ahead of next year’s elections, and we need to remain alert,” said Ben Nimmo, global lead for threat intelligence at Meta, according to the Associated Press.
In the report, Meta revealed that the fake accounts were posting content related to U.S. domestic politics and U.S.-China relations and often copied word-for-word the posts of prominent political figures.
Meta’s report showed examples of the accounts posting content from both Republican and Democratic politicians including Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), and Jason Crow (D-CO).
The fake accounts even included photos, names, and locations to create the appearance of ordinary Americans expressing political views. As it turns out, instead of ordinary Americans, many vexed Facebook users were engaging with Chinese bots online.
Meta acknowledged previous foreign attempts to interfere in U.S. politics through platforms such as Facebook, most notably Russian fake accounts that social media companies attempted to purge off their platforms ahead of the 2020 election.
The key differences between past interference attempts and China’s current efforts are that China is focusing on reposting real, albeit plagiarized, content — and that content represents a variety of political views, as opposed to voicing one side.
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The representation of polarizing views held by various competing parties instead of flooding Facebook with one particular set of ideas suggests that the intended purpose of these fake accounts is to create more division in a country with no shortage of disunity.
“These networks still struggle to build audiences,” Nimmo said, “But they’re a warning.”