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China Microsoft Social Networks

Chinese Social Media Campaigns Are Successfully Impersonating US Voters, Microsoft Warns (cnbc.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the report, which focused on the rise in "digital threats from East Asia." The Microsoft report also cautioned that some Chinese influence campaigns are now using generative artificial intelligence to create visual content that's "already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic" users, a trend the company said began around March.

Chinese influence campaigns have historically struggled to gain traction with intended targets, who in this case are U.S. voters and residents. But since the 2022 midterm elections, those efforts have become more effective, Microsoft warned. Microsoft found content from Chinese influence campaigns on multiple apps, including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and X. In August, Facebook parent Meta announced it had disrupted the largest ever identified disinformation campaign and linked it to China state-affiliated actors. Microsoft's report included screenshots of two different X posts in April that were identified as CCP-affiliated disinformation. Both were about the Black Lives Matter movement and had the same graphic. The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.
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Chinese Social Media Campaigns Are Successfully Impersonating US Voters, Microsoft Warns More

Chinese Social Media Campaigns Are Successfully Impersonating US Voters, Microsoft Warns

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  • Have they gotten better (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday September 07, 2023 @05:28PM (#63830744)
    I have to wonder if they have improved or if we have just become more willing to believe anything that stokes our narrative

    • I have to wonder if they have improved or if we have just become more willing to believe anything that stokes our narrative

      Why not both?

    • Re:Have they gotten better (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday September 07, 2023 @05:40PM (#63830760)
      No reason to think they wouldn't have upped their game. For one thing, generative AI took a huge leap forward since the last election cycle. It's a boon for propaganda, and especially enabling for somebody who doesn't even speak the language.
      • It's definitely been neutered in it's usefulness for a particular side though.
        • China won't be doing this with ChatGPT or any other US-hosted model. If nothing else there are pretty good open-source LLM's from which you can remove filters pretty easily, and if needed fine-tune them to alter their biases fairly easily too.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            China has a lot of home-grown LLMs. I've noticed a massive improvement in the quality of translation using them lately. Often they read like native speakers now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

      I have to wonder if they have improved or if we have just become more willing to believe anything that stokes our narrative

      Actually, the opposite is happening. There is so much misinformation that voters have become cynical and don't believe anyone. Political advertising is becoming less effective.

      Those who pay the most attention to politics on social media are those whose minds are already made up and are the least likely to change their views.

      There was an article about this in the Economist: Polarization inoculates voters against misinformation [economist.com].

      • So the whole shit finally had a good effect, too.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        That's worse. Voters end up simply picking and choosing what they want to believe. The famous "alternative facts" - find some somewhat true information that affirms your preferred narrative, and dismiss anything that contradicts it as fake news.

      • Actually, the opposite is happening. There is so much misinformation that voters have become cynical and don't believe anyone. Political advertising is becoming less effective.

        Is it less effective or is it the candidates getting shittier and shittier, so people don't bother caring any more.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Couldn't tell that from Republican voters. In polls, the still believe the former alleged president is telling the truth and not a bunco artist.

    • They've improved. According to the article, the government has been tapping top language graduates and former journalists to write these things. The result is posts with clean grammar and a good formal structure. A lot of times they present themselves as being from India, or a former US military pilot. However, their opinions do not match the opinions of the people they pretend to be, usually in obvious ways.
    • Perhaps the Chinese previously assumed too high a level of intelligence & sanity from US social media users, & have now adjusted their campaigns to something closer to "Florida man mentality" & found it works much better?
  • That's BLM platform, they believe the US economic system has failed them:

    Movement for Black Lives is unabashedly anti-capitalist, saying on its website, “We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”

    It is clear, then, that CPA [Chinese Progressive Association] Boston works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States as CPA San Francisco does, and th

  • Look at the mirror (Score:3)

    by hackingbear ( 988354 ) on Thursday September 07, 2023 @07:31PM (#63831028)

    You can see it in the mirror [project-syndicate.org]:

    Americans have been understandably outraged and alarmed about foreign electoral interference. But the practice is not new; in fact, the United States was for a long time its leading exponent. As Dov Levin shows in his book, Meddling in the Ballot Box, the US and the Soviet Union (and subsequently Russia) engaged in 117 covert or overt foreign electoral interventions to help or hinder candidates or parties between 1946 and 2000, with the US accounting for 81 of these cases (or 69% of the total).

    Other people on this planet doing the same are criminal, because the US monopolizes the whole planet and define who are allowed!

    • Geez comrade, did you rtfa? Microsoft is hot on your tail. You're supposed to be laying low until the heat dies down.

      • Microsoft is hot on your tail.

        How? Oh... I'm a Microsoft user... you are saying that American products are full of spying back doors? You must hate this country so much to say that or you're telling the truth. I can't tell which best describe you.

        • Yes comrade, that's it exactly. I just checked my secret NSA spy records and determined that you are indeed a Microsoft user.

          So to be clear, my comment had nothing to do with the relationship of the blatant Chinese propaganda in your original post to the article linked at the top of this page describing how Microsoft has been tracking Chinese propaganda on the internet.

          • I just checked my secret NSA spy records

            Thank you for confessing the NSA of USA is the evil spy of the world. You will get the treatment of Edward Snowden from your superior officer very soon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem is that half the electorate doesn't mind interference, because they think it's helping their guy win.

  • Act of war. (Score:3)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Thursday September 07, 2023 @11:00PM (#63831364)
    Advertise your intentions all you want. Even bribe worthless Americans to spout your nonsense, because there's no shortage of those. But hacking our political process with fraudulent communications is an act of war.

    Make that plain to them and give them a deadline to stop. At the end of that deadline, if they have not, declare that China's possession of Tibet is illegal, Taiwan has the right to be an independent nation (if it declares itself to be one), and the illegal regime in Beijing has placed itself as incompatible with the survival of the United States of America.
    • I won't bring up the many, many, many democratic elections America has influenced with propaganda and even in more... kinetic ways but pretending to be someone you're not is quickly becoming an American tradition and if sockpuppeting is a crime half of Slashdot needs to go to jail. As for this type of misinformation in general it's a sad fact that it's going to be everywhere, put out by every major side of every major political issue. We need a new way to make democracy work in the face of it.

      Picking an ar
      • "I won't engage in whataboutism, but whatabout all those times when America did this and that..."

        Very original, relevant, and persuasive. Thanks for participating.
        • This is the perfect example of the fallacy fallacy. The fallacy fallacy is a mistake or tactic wherein it is claimed that if a fallacy exists, or seems to exist, anywhere in the opponent's words, the entire presented argument is fallacious.
          • Fair enough. However, we must accept that state-organized fraud campaigns designed to subvert democracy are hostile acts far beyond the incivility of private citizens against each other. These are acts designed to facilitate much broader campaigns of violence and malevolence, and must rationally be treated as such.

            If you've ever heard the phrase, "Those who would burn books will soon burn people"? It works on many levels. Those who would impersonate a voter would also impersonate a vote, or deny it e
  • Apart from low education, low information voters who readily take most things at face value, I don't see how they're going to fool all of We the People all of the time.
  • FTS: The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.

    How did I guess conservatives were the marks? I guess our international competitors and adversaries can easily see our big red weakness, and know that one side ... and one side only ... will be the death of the US.

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