The huge disinformation campaign ran for almost five years. The reputation of Chinese, Russians and Iranians was blackened. Falsified accounts pushed stories in tandem with US govt media VOA, RFE and others.
A torrent of disinformation about the Chinese and other communities painted as enemies of the Western allies ran for almost five years on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter, researchers reported on Wednesday.
“These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies,” reads the shocking study by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the research company Graphika.
The sophisticated system originated from the US and the UK, the study said. The perpetrators worked in tandem with groups which presented themselves as news organizations, but were really partner assets, or even major US government operations such as Voice of America and the Radio Free Asia group, which includes Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and others.
Facebook and Twitter said they had taken down the sham accounts.
Assets focused on China
The massive operation “used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives”, according to the study.
“Two assets concentrated on China and the treatment of Chinese Muslim minorities”, the report reads, particularly the Uygurs in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
For example, researchers noted that one Twitter account said it operated on behalf of the US military but also posed as an Iraqi individual sending tweets from his home country.
AI-generated people
The number of techniques used by the operations was remarkable, as was the length of time it ran before being discovered. The study is called “Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.”
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a) Narrative creators made multiple fake personas with AI-generated faces to appear as authentic human beings. These appeared as accounts of “real people” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other media;
b) Narrative creators posed as journalists running independent media outlets;
c) Narrative creators made memes and short videos (for sharing on TikTok, Instagram and others);
d) Narrative creators ran hashtag campaigns across platforms;
e) Narrative creators launched online petitions on “change” style sites known for “human rights” campaigns.
The players had “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms” indicating a high level, well-organized operation to deceive
The players had “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms” indicating a high level, well-organized operation to deceive. This enabled agents to back up false narratives by quoting each other: they backed up false news with quotes from what seemed to be small news operations or even large ones, like Voice of America, to promote a pro-West, anti-East narrative.
Exploited sympathy for women
Sham media outlets used the theme of women’s rights to create negativity towards non-Western groups, according to the report.
“For example, the Shestigrannik Facebook page repeatedly accused Russia and China of ignoring the Taliban’s ethnic cleansing of Afghan minorities and mistreatment of women,” the researchers said.
Agents sometimes created posts in Russian or other Central Asian languages, the researchers said. The one on the left, above, revives a long debunked allegation about organ-harvesting in China, and the one on the right paints China as the power behind Russian aggression.
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While there were cases of some agents creating accounts which failed to win many followers, or were not widely shared, in other instances they succeeded in producing material which spread or went viral.
“A small cluster of assets within the Central Asia group focused almost exclusively on China,” the report reads.
Other assets in the sham network painted an image of China imperilling the world.
Fake petitions
Western agents created petitions such as the one above, pretending to be people in Central Asia demanding that Kyrgyzstan curbs Chinese influence in the country, the study showed. The petitions were shared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Agents’ petitions were sometimes shared on a well-known U.S. human rights activism platform called Avaaz, and promoted by Radio Liberty, a partner of Radio Free Asia: these are groups which present themselves as journalists, while actually being arms of the US government.
In reality, China has good relationships with Kyrgyzstan and have been having lengthy talks towards building a “New Eurasian Land Bridge”, which will be a convenient transport path from East and Southeast Asia to Central and Western Asia, Northern Africa and Europe. The plan is to create prosperity through improved infrastructure that creates opportunities for trade.
Projection technique
For decades, a key technique of Western intelligence forces has been to announce exactly what they are doing in the media – but ascribe it to “the enemy”. So there have been numerous false allegations of Chinese interference with politics in the US, while the truth was that the US had massive operations interfering in politics in Chinese communities, particularly in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan.
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The existence of an artificial Western narrative is rarely acknowledged—and even more rarely confronted. China-friendly voices are seen being removed from Twitter frequently. But the other way round?
Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, told the New York Times: “It’s the first time we’ve seen a pro-US foreign influence operation taken down by Twitter and Meta.”
Multi-lingual
Another remarkable aspect of the study was its revelation of how culturally wide the false narrative dissemination operation was. Just a few days ago, the New York Times printed a long feature bemoaning the ability of the West to control the discourse outside the Anglosphere.
Yet the new study reveals that the Western narrative operation functioned in at least seven non-English languages on global social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, and also on allegedly “secure” operations such as Telegram, and even on popular non-Western networks VK and Odnoklassniki, run from Russia.
Little Impact
The report, dramatic as it was, received relatively little coverage internationally. There were pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post reporting the publication of the study, but without follow-up. Some media mentioned the report but played it down. Cyberwire headlined their report: “Not all coordinated inauthenticity is Russian”.
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But even if there is no change in the narrative carried by the mainstream media, critics still welcomed the study. A Twitter user who has been banned three times for questioning the Western narrative said: “This is just one more nail in the coffin of the narrative’s credibility, and that’s a good thing.”
Nury Vittachi is the editor of Fridayeveryday.com, a new media and events group based in Hong Kong. He wrote the comedy-crime novel series The Feng Shui Detective as well as non-fiction works and novels for children.
The article was published earlier at PEARLS & IRRITATIONS. https://johnmenadue.com/massive-secret-network-revealed-to-be-pushing-Western -narrative/