Meta shut down close to 9,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts, groups and pages associated with a Chinese political spam network that had targeted users in Australia and other parts of the world, the company has revealed. Meta began investigating the so-called Spamouflage network after several research groups including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi) first discovered the foreign influence campaign. In a report released by the social media giant on Tuesday, Meta said it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 pages, 15 groups and 15 Instagram accounts identified as violating…
Tag: Social media
Meta’s ‘Biggest Single Takedown’ Removes Chinese Influence Campaign
On Feb. 27, an article claiming that the United States was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream underwater pipelines in the Baltic Sea was published on the Substack and Blogspot blogging platforms. Within 24 hours, the article — and other versions of it — had been posted to more websites, including Reddit, Medium, Tumblr, Facebook and YouTube. Translations of the article in Greek, German, Russian, Italian and Turkish also began appearing online. The posts were part of a Chinese influence campaign that stands out as the largest such operation…
In China, Artists Create Miniature Homes From Memories
Not long after Shen Peng’s grandfather died, his grandmother visited the site of the house where she and her husband once lived. The government had demolished the house, in northern China, nearly 15 years before as part of a redevelopment project. The site still hadn’t been developed, and she could barely walk around the family’s old plot because the grass was so overgrown. Mr. Shen wondered: Could he help her relive her memories another way? For more than six months, he labored in secret after his day job as a…
Chinese social media filled with anti-black racist content, says watchdog
Chinese social media is littered with racist videos, particularly content that mocks black people or portrays them through offensive racial stereotypes, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found. The human rights watchdog analysed hundreds of videos posted on Chinese social media since 2021 and found that major platforms, including Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo and Xiaohongshu, “do not routinely address racist content”. One type of video that is popular on Chinese social media portrays people in African countries as primitive or impoverished, with Chinese people – often the content creators…
When Tragedy Strikes in China, the Government Cracks Down on Grief
Many innocent lives were lost to tragic events in China in the past month. So far we haven’t learned a single name of any of them from China’s government or its official media. Nor have we seen news interviews of family members talking about their loved ones. Those victims would include a coach and 10 members of a middle-school girls volleyball team who were killed in late July when the roof caved in on a gymnasium near the Siberian border. Despite an outpouring of public grief and anger around the…
‘Into brain and the heart’: how China is using apps to woo Taiwan’s teenagers
Ariel Lo spends a couple of hours most weeks sharing anime art and memes on Chinese apps, often chatting with friends in China in a Mandarin slightly different from the one she uses at home in Taiwan. “People use English on Instagram, and for Chinese apps they use Chinese phrases. If I am talking to friends in China, I would use them,” Lo said as she picked up a bubble tea at a street market in central Taichung city. The 18-year-old Earth sciences student, who creates art in her spare…
Chinese Zoo: This Is a Real Sun Bear, Not a Costume
Sun, moon, grizzly, black, spectacled, sloth: Bears all over the world can stand, shuffle, totter and walk on two legs, though they usually prefer four. They do not — strictly speaking — talk. But a zoo in Hangzhou, China, decided that the best way to clear up a conspiracy theory about one of its bears was to release a statement in the bear’s voice. The confusion appeared to begin in late July, when a video surfaced on the Chinese social media site Weibo of a sun bear named Angela standing…
‘The everything app’: why Elon Musk wants X to be a WeChat for the west
Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a “digital death”. Commonly described as a smartphone messaging platform, it is more like several apps rolled into one, used for messaging, social media, payments, subscriptions, utility bills, food deliveries, plane and train tickets, ride hailing and much more. It is owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent. And Elon Musk would like a rebranded Twitter to be just as indispensable in the west.…
WeChat user numbers plummet nearly 30% in Australia amid concerns of Chinese interference
WeChat has said its user numbers in Australia have declined almost 30% in the past three years, amid questions being raised about foreign interference on the app. Tencent-owned WeChat told a parliamentary committee examining foreign interference on social media that as of July 2023, the communications app favoured by Australia’s Chinese diaspora community had fewer than 500,000 daily active users in Australia. The company told the committee in 2020 that its user base was 690,000. No reason was given for the decline in user numbers in Australia in the past…
The Regulatory Questions Swirling Around Meta’s Threads
Taylor Swift re-records her way onto the charts Taylor Swift on Thursday released the re-recorded version of one of her older albums, “Speak Now,” calling the move a “form of rebellion.” The singer is on a mission to re-record the first six albums in her catalog (she has done three) after the rights to the originals were sold in a contentious deal to the superagent Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019 for north of $300 million. The investment firm Shamrock Capital Advisors bought the masters a year later for about…