Proactive Investors - Chinese state-aligned media disinformation campaigns are targeting US politics with alarming efficiency, according to a new threat analysis report from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).
Microsoft said it found content from Chinese influence campaigns on Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Facebook (NASDAQ:META) and Instagram apps, X/Twitter and even Microsoft’s own LinkedIn in a report titled “Digital threats from East Asia increase in breadth and effectiveness.”
Specifically, Chinese influencer campaigns are impersonation American voters online and targeting political candidates on social media. This type of foreign influence isn’t exactly new, but it’s getting more sophisticated, Microsoft warned.
“[Chinese Communist Party]-affiliated covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed,” according to the report.
These influence operations (IOs) are also making use of generative AI to increase engagement with real people, which Microsoft refers to as authentic users.
“Since approximately March 2023, some suspected Chinese IO assets on Western social media have begun to leverage generative artificial intelligence to create visual content,” according to the report. “This relatively high-quality visual content has already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic social media users.”
Microsoft included a screenshot of a Black Lives Matter graphic in its report that was first uploaded by a CCP-affiliated automated account, then uploaded by an account pretending to be a US conservative voter just seven hours later.
Targeting Meta
Last month, Meta announced that it disrupted what it called the “largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world” connected to Chinese law enforcement.
Facebook removed more than 7,700 accounts and 930 pages which primarily generated positive content about China’s Xinjiang province — where the Chinese government has drawn international sanctions for its treatment of the Uyghur ethnic group.
The campaign also developed negative content about the US, posting disinformation in multiple languages about the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Meta.
Meta researchers connected the disinformation network to a previous influence campaign in 2019, which was code named “Spamouflage.”
“Taken together, we assess Spamouflage to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation to date,” Meta said in its quarterly threat report. “Although the people behind this activity tried to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement.”