Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Sep 22, 2020 17 tweets 5 min read Read on X
BREAKING: @Facebook announced a takedown of assets run by individuals in China.

Operation Naval Gazing:

Focus on maritime security and the South China Sea;
Lot of content on the Philippines and Taiwan;
Small, apparently bipartisan volume on the US.

about.fb.com/news/2020/09/r…
Here's the @Graphika_NYC report.

Overall, 155 accounts on FB, 11 pages, 9 groups, 6 Instagram accounts.

2017: mostly Taiwan
2018-19: + Philippines and South China Sea
2020: + US-centric content.

The biggest audience was in the Philippines.

graphika.com/reports/operat…
Operation Naval Gazing was mostly *not* about U.S. domestic politics.

But I suspect that's where the most urgent questions will be.

So...
Op Naval Gazing ran one group each that claimed to support Buttigieg, Trump and Biden.

Together, they amassed around 2,000 members.

The tone for each one was suited to the presumed target audience.
Around those assets, there were a couple of dozen fake accounts, usually fairly rudimentary.

One each posed as strongly pro-Trump and pro-Biden. Tryinig to attract an audience, perhaps.
Most didn't even have that level of posting: some only had profile pics, some didn't even have that. Just likes, often with a Navy focus.
The main focus was the South China Sea. That's where this started back in early 2017, with posts about Taiwan.

That focus stayed all the way through.
In 2018, it started posting about the Philippines, and more generally about maritime issues in the South China Sea.

A lot of the content was pro-Duterte or attacked the opposition and independent journalists, including @mariaressa.
Mixed in with that was content praising China's role and power in the region, and Duterte's attitude thereto.
The accounts that promoted this were pretty unsubtle: same imagery, a couple of new accounts each day.

I think of this sort of account creation as Sons of Batches.
Other accounts used the same stock photos...
... and recent ones used GAN-generated images.

Again.

A year ago, this was a novelty. Now it feels like every operation we analyse tries this at least once.
Periodically, the U.S. did show up in the messaging.

But it was primarily in relation to China.

Geopolitics, not politics.
The theme that ran through all this was an interest in maritime security, especially China's purported dominance in the South China Sea.

Naval Gazing, in fact.
Overall, this adds to our understanding of influence ops from China, though this was *not* attributed to any organisation.

The main themes match known Chinese strategic concerns: Taiwan, South China Sea, Hong Kong.

The outreach in the Philippines is novel and interesting.
The U.S. approach was also novel. It looked most like audience building, but it was taken down too early to actually *build* a significant audience.
As always with influence ops, it's important to remember:
not all operations are created equal. In this case, not all parts of the operation were created equal.

Keep to the evidence. Keep calm. But keep watch.

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More from @benimmo

Sep 27, 2022
🚨BREAKING🚨
@Meta took down two covert influence ops:
Big one from Russia🇷🇺 targeting Europe with spoofed media websites like the Guardian and Spiegel
First one from China 🇨🇳 to focus on both sides of domestic US 🇺🇸 politics and Czech-China relations.
about.fb.com/news/2022/09/r…
@Meta The operations were very different, but both worked on multiple social media platforms and petitions sites.
The Russian op was even on LiveJournal (cute).
List of domains, petitions etc in the report. #OSINT community, happy hunting!
@Meta China: this was the first Chinese network we’ve disrupted that focused on US domestic politics ahead of the midterms and Czech foreign policy toward China and Ukraine.
It was small, we took it down before it built an audience, but that’s a new direction for Chinese IO.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 4, 2022
🚨JUST OUT🚨
Quarterly threat report from @Meta’s investigative teams.
Takedowns from around the world:
Cyber espionage in South Asia;
Harassment in India;
Violating networks in Greece, South Africa, India;
Influence ops from Malaysia & Israel
AND...
about.fb.com/news/2022/08/m…
A deep dive into a Russian troll farm, linked to people with ties to what’s known as the Internet Research Agency.
It used fake accounts across the internet to make it look like there’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine - and to pretend the troll farm's doing a good job.
The operation called itself “Cyber Front Z”.

We think of it as the Z Team, because it was about as far from being the A Team as you can get.
Read 11 tweets
Apr 7, 2022
🚨JUST OUT🚨
Quarterly threat report from @Meta’s investigative teams.
Much to dig into:
State & non-state actors targeting Ukraine;
Cyber espionage from Iran and Azerbaijan;
Influence ops in Brazil and Costa Rica;
Spammy activity in the Philippines...
about.fb.com/news/2022/04/m…
I’ll focus this thread on Ukraine. For more on the rest, see the great @ngleicher and @DavidAgranovich.
We’ve seen state & non-state ops targeting Ukraine across the internet since the invasion, including attempts from:

🇧🇾 Belarus KGB
👹 A Russian “NGO” w/ some links to past IRA folks
👻 Ghostwriter

We caught these early, before they could build audience or be effective.
Read 15 tweets
Feb 28, 2022
🚨 TAKEDOWN 🚨
This weekend, we took down a relatively small influence operation that had targeted Ukraine across multiple social media platforms and websites. It was run by people in Russia and Ukraine: about.fb.com/news/2022/02/s…
It consisted of approx 40 accounts, Groups and Pages on FB and IG, plus on Twitter, YouTube, VK, OK, Telegram.

It mainly posted links to long-form articles on its websites, without much luck making them engaging. It got very few reactions, and under 4k followers.
It ran a few fake personas posing as authors. They had fake profile pics (likely GAN), and unusually detailed public bios - e.g. former civil aviation engineer, hydrography expert.

The op posted their articles on its websites and social media, & amplified them using more fakes.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 27, 2022
Personal 🧵 based on years of OSINT research into influence operations since 2014.

Looking at the Russian official messaging on “de-nazification” and “genocide”, it’s worth putting them in context of the many different Russian IO that targeted Ukraine over the years.
Way back in 2014, Russian military intel ran a series of fake “hacktivist” personas that targeted Ukraine. Note the “Nazi” theme.

Screenshots from @Graphika_NYC research, based on Facebook takedown.
about.fb.com/news/2020/09/r…
public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphi… Image
Still in 2014, one of the busiest days the Internet Research Agency had on Twitter was when it falsely accused Ukraine of shooting down flight MH-17 as a “provocation”.
Screenshot from @DFRLab /Twitter archives.
transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/inf…
medium.com/dfrlab/trolltr… Image
Read 10 tweets
Jan 20, 2022
JUST OUT: Report on coordinated inauthentic behaviour takedowns in December, and a look back over the past year & more.

Interesting: 2/3 of all ops we removed since 2017 were wholly or partially focused on domestic audiences.

about.fb.com/news/2022/01/d… Image
We took down three operations last month:

* Iran, targeting the UK, focusing on Scottish independence;
* Mexico, a PR firm targeting audiences across LATAM;
* Turkey, targeting Libya, and linked to the Libyan Justice and Construction Party (affiliated w/Muslim Brotherhood).
It’s not the first time for an Iranian op to pose as supporters of Scottish independence.
In the past, FB found a page that copied and posted political cartoons about independence as far back as 2013.
@Graphika_NYC writeup here (pages 26-27)
graphika.com/reports/irans-…
Read 11 tweets

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