Google, X Executives Name China as Top Disinformation Offender

An unnamed Chinese hacker uses a computer at an office in Dongguan, in China's southern Guangdong Province, on Aug. 4, 2020. Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images

Senior executives from Google and X identified China as the top source of foreign interference and disinformation campaigns during their testimonies to the Canadian House of Commons ethics committee on Oct. 24.

During the committee meeting, Conservative MP Michael Cooper asked the X platform representative which foreign state is the most active in spreading or attempting to spread disinformation in Canada on their platform.

“From our experience over the past year, the spamouflage campaign, which is linked to China, has been the most active,” said Wifredo Fernández, head of government affairs for the X platform in the United States and Canada.

In October 2023, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) reported that dozens of MPs, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, were targets of China’s “spamouflage” campaign—a form of disinformation that uses networks of newly created or compromised social media accounts to disseminate and amplify propaganda across platforms.

The GAC reported that a bot network left thousands of comments in English and French on Facebook and X, which were detected by its Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM), a tool used by Canada and its G7 allies to monitor foreign state-backed disinformation in the digital information environment.

Fernández testified that, over the past year, X took down roughly 60,000 accounts connected to China’s spamouflage operations, including 9,500 identified through alerts from the RRM.

Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, also removed “thousands of accounts” linked to the spamouflage campaign, testified Lindsay Hundley, the company’s global threat intelligence lead.

“We’ve removed thousands of accounts and pages after we were able to connect different clusters of activity together as part of a single operation, and we’re able to attribute that operation to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement,” she told the ethics committee.

“We’ve identified over 50 platforms and forums that spamouflage has used, including Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium, Blogspot, LiveJournal, VidCon, Vimeo, and dozens of other smaller platforms and forums.”

Hundley said Meta found no evidence that Beijing’s spamouflage campaign gained “substantial engagement” among genuine users on its platforms. However, she noted that the Chinese campaign operates on a global scale and has targeted Canadian audiences as part of its efforts.

“China-origin operations have evolved significantly in recent years to target broader, more global audiences, including in languages other than Chinese,” she said.

“These operations have continued to diversify their tactics, including targeting critics of the Chinese government, attempting to co-opt authentic individuals, and using [artificial intelligence]-generated news readers in an attempt to make fictitious news outlets look more legitimate.”

In addition to Chinese operations, Hundley said Meta has recently removed nearly 40 operations from Russia targeting audiences worldwide, including four new operations in the past quarter.

“Russia, Iran, and China remain the top three sources of foreign interference networks globally,” Hundley told the committee.