An analysis by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, says a year-long influence campaign led by covert users with ties to the authoritarian regime in China peddled anti-American and pro-Chinese messaging across thousands of Facebook accounts and hundreds of pages.

The campaign, dubbed “Spamoflauge,” was led by covert users who garnered more than half a million followers across 50 online forums and social media sites, including the company formerly known as Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, as well as Medium and Meta-owned platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

“We assess Spamouflage to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation to date,” the report, released Tuesday, states. 

The report did not confirm that Spamoflauge’s activity was managed by Chinese governmental agents, but linked it to clusters of similar campaigns promoting Chinese interests, which the tech giant has been removing since August 2019 under its Inauthentic Behavior policy. 

“Although the people behind this activity tried to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement,” Meta researchers said. 

The blitzes of propaganda across many platforms denounced the United States, Western foreign policies, and critics of the Chinese government, including journalists and researchers. One fake article posted by a Medium account had the headline: “Can we get rid of ‘cancer’ of racial discrimination in the US?” 

Many Spamoflauge headlines featured typos and poor wording, which made them susceptible to open-source investigation, such as: “Queen Elizabeth II Dead or Related to New Prime Minister Truss?”

Although the operation’s efforts to shape public opinion were generally of low quality, their size and spread were unprecedented, targeting audiences in Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the global Chinese-speaking population. It appears to be part of a larger effort by the Chinese government to solidify its growing power by sowing seeds of disorder in the West using social media. 

“Pick a place on the internet, and they’re probably trying to go there to spread effectively a fairly simple set of messages that praise China and criticize the United States and Western foreign policies,” Meta’s global threat intelligence lead, Ben Nimmo, told Politico.

In April, the Department of Justice charged 34 people with operating an internet troll farm that used fake accounts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter to spread disinformation and harass Chinese dissidents. Their messages covered a range of topics, including the war in Ukraine, the origins of Covid, and the killing of George Floyd, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. 

An investigation by Safeguard Defenders has highlighted more than a hundred Chinese government-backed overseas “police stations” operating in more than 50 countries to catch and punish Chinese dissidents, showcasing the lengths to which the Communist power brokers will go to monitor speech that deviates from the party narrative. 

Efforts by the West to reduce foreign meddling on social media platforms might not be helping. The United Nations is negotiating an anti-cybercrime treaty that would grant governments access to billions of users’ personal data in the interest of “combating the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes,” according to a General Assembly’s 2019 resolution.

Human rights groups fear the treaty, which is entering its final stage of negotiation at New York next week, will intensify police surveillance powers across borders. By providing dictatorships with further tools of repression and criminalizing online speech, the rules could resolve certain online safety concerns while blowing open the floodgates on others.

Meanwhile, Meta will expand its research from regular threat reports to emerging threats to better counter malicious activity on the internet. 

“Existing mechanisms to redress abuse are not sufficient to have material impact at scale,” the report, which was published as part of Meta’s quarterly reporting series that seeks to share cyber threat indicators with the broader security community, concluded. “We believe that industry-wide action is needed to protect people against these tactics and raise our collective defenses.”