After a tip from Twitter, Facebook removes 7 Pages, 3 Groups, 5 accounts originating in China “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior” regarding Hong Kong
Today, we removed seven Pages, three Groups and five Facebook accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior …
Two things make this installment different: the origin is China rather than Iran or Russia, and the tip came from Twitter — a rival platform — rather than an outside research firm, signaling that takedown intelligence is now flowing laterally between social networks.
First-order effects
Fifteen assets — seven Pages, three Groups and five accounts — are removed from Facebook mid-Hong Kong protests, cutting off a China-origin influence operation's reach on the platform at a geopolitically sensitive moment.
Twitter's role as the tipster puts its own platform under scrutiny as the discovery layer for operations that spill across services.
Second-order effects
Cross-platform tip-sharing becomes operationally valuable enough that platforms have an incentive to formalize it, since networks banned on one service demonstrably resurface on another.
China joins Iran and Russia in Facebook's recurring takedown ledger, raising the likelihood that future sweeps are scoped to watch for Beijing-aligned behavior patterns alongside the established Russian and Iranian playbooks.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, coordinated inauthentic behavior enforcement hardens into standing inter-platform infrastructure — shared signals, recurring published ledgers — that treats state information operations as a persistent category rather than episodic incidents, with the roster of implicated states widening beyond the original Iran-Russia focus.
The trend: Platform takedowns of coordinated inauthentic behavior are evolving from researcher-tipped, single-country sweeps into routine cross-platform enforcement against a broadening set of state actors.
Working on something longer with @noUpside on this, but I'll make a short-term meta-comment. Two of the three relevant companies have made public statements. Neither have realistic prospects in the PRC, the other does. From the US media reaction silence might be the best move. ht…
I told @mariecbaca that the use of English-language accounts is significant, showing that the state is increasingly seeking to control information flow outside China. The question now is, who was this targeting? https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Lots of lessons from this episode, but one might be an reinforcement of how Russia represents “easy mode” for platforms doing state attribution. It's a lot harder when the actor is financially critical, like the PRC or India.
Are you telling me all those Twitter accounts with 0 followers and ten random numbers in the handle, that responded “China #1” to every article about Hong Kong weren't authentic? https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Twitter and Facebook announced they found and removed a large network of Chinese government-backed accounts spreading disinformation about the protests in Hong Kong. This is just one example of how authoritarian regimes use social media to manipulate people, at home and abroad. h…
This is a case study on what happens when Big Tech gets cozy with the Chinese government. China will abuse any technology at its disposal to advance its authoritarian goals https://twitter.com/...
For the first time, Twitter and Facebook called out the Chinese government directly for “inauthentic behavior” on their platforms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Facebook found similar activity: “Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the Chinese government.” https://newsroom.fb.com/...