July 12, 2023
Chinese agents are spreading targeted misinformation to journalists on Facebook as part of new efforts coming out of the Communist Party state to grow its influence.
Meta, which owns the social media giant, removed 200 operations globally for “violating our policy against co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour, and these networks came from 68 countries and operated in 42 languages”, Meta regional director of policy Mia Garlick told the Senate Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media on Tuesday.
In the first quarter of 2023, Meta disrupted two so-called Co-ordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB) networks originating out of China, and although they did not specifically target Australia, Meta said there had been a shift in tactics by China-based agents.
“Fifty per cent of the China-based CIB networks that we have actioned in the last four years, we’ve taken down in the last seven months, and we are seeing a range of new tactics evolving, such as operations that are linked to troll farms, attempts to co-opt journalists, NGOs or other respected third parties, attempts to work through PR firms,” Meta’s Australian head of public policy, Josh Machin, said.
Mr Machin said these tactics had been used by other foreign operations but now China had begun to experiment with them.
Attempts by foreign governments to use social media to influence other nations have become a mainstay for all players in the industry.
LinkedIn senior director of digital security Joshua Reiten said more than 80 million fake accounts were blocked on the Microsoft-owned business platform, including 400,000 attributed to Australia.
ASIO has warned that LinkedIn is being used by foreign powers to recruit people. Earlier this year, ASIO boss Mike Burgess warned that 16,000 Australian users still stated their security clearance on their profiles.
“When you have these foreign adversary state-sponsored actors who are engaging on our platform, they are invariably doing so through a fake account,” Mr Reiten told the committee on Tuesday.
“We invest heavily in automated measures to detect those fake accounts at creation, so when bad actors are trying to do that at scale, we are trying to detect the patterns in that fake account creation, those fake account creation efforts and restrict them before they ever go live.”
LinkedIn had a threat prevention team whose full-time job was to disrupt state-sponsored activity, Mr Reiten said.
In the feistiest exchange of the day, opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson pursued TikTok over claims made in an opinion article by its Australian general manager Lee Hunter last year.
Mr Hunter wrote the article for The Daily Telegraph last October following revelations in the US that journalists were spied on through the app by the company. His opinion article said a mode of surveillance alleged in an article in Forbes Magazine was not possible. However, in December 2022, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, acknowledged that its claims about the Forbes story were false.
“Once it emerged after our op-ed that this serious misconduct by those rogue employees had taken place, of course, like many people, I was extremely disappointed in those actions, and heartened by the efforts that have taken place since to strengthen our security protocols and our policies within our business to ensure that that can’t happen again,” Mr Hunter said.
Mr Paterson responded: “Have you ever sought to publicly correct those false claims you made?”
“I stand by the sentiments that were expressed in that op-ed and I would not categorise the efforts as spying,” Mr Lee replied.
