Collaborate Disseminate
A long-running Kremlin propaganda campaign is experimenting with AI to create phony news sites but isn’t reaching a significant audience.
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A clumsy social media influence operation that aligns itself with Chinese government interests has started gaining traction online, according to Graphika research published Thursday. Social media activity associated with the campaign, known as Spamouflage Dragon, has typically failed to attract many eyeballs. Some recent tweets, though, have attracted attention from Chinese diplomats, prominent politicians in Venezuela and Pakistan, a senior figure at Huawei Europe and a commentator in the U.K. The campaign’s YouTube following has grown as well in recent months, according to the social media analysis firm Graphika. Spamouflage Dragon, a cross-platform social media influence campaign, has been working for years to spread pro-Chinese government propaganda online, is one of many influence operations that seizes on news of the day to peddle its narratives. While it appears to have significant resourcing, it has largely failed to gain amplification due to its overtly spammy behavior and rudimentary execution. Many of […]
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When Facebook said in August it had removed a network of fake accounts that had been trying to amplify criticism of President Donald Trump, it gave some external researchers a sense of déjà vu. After all, Facebook had taken intermittent action against accounts, pages and groups that were misrepresenting themselves to promote China’s Communist Party, including specific removals of a campaign known as Spamouflage Dragon. The Spamouflage campaign apparently began in the summer of 2019 as a scheme to denounce pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, eventually shifting to demonize critics of Beijing and to praise China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. By August 2020, Facebook, like Twitter and YouTube, was still removing Spamouflage-affiliated accounts that bashed Trump’s inaction on the coronavirus and U.S. scrutiny of TikTok under its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policy. Other networks of accounts also have managed to return to Facebook after they were detected and previously removed, […]
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Chinese social media accounts are not happy with President Donald Trump. A network of accounts on multiple platforms has been criticizing Trump and broadcasting more positive images of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as part of an apparent campaign to rebuke the White House, according to a report published Wednesday by Graphika, a New York-based research firm. The network, which Graphika describes as “Spamouflage Dragon,” produces short videos on a near-daily basis on topics ranging from the Trump administration’s decision to prohibit the social media company TikTok in the U.S. to the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Whether the network was connected to the Chinese government remains unclear, Graphika said. Details of the campaign emerge after a U.S. intelligence assessment determined that Beijing was working to reduce the president’s reelection chances. “The network was active and public, but ultimately low-engagement,” the report stated. “It typically worked by using apparently […]
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