This month, Meta have announced a new update to their Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour policy, which involves making information on CIB instances more accessible to third party researchers. They have worked with CrowdTangle to build a platform which holds data collected by the company on disinformation campaigns over the past 5 years, in the hope that new insights from outside sources can aid in detecting and halting such campaigns in the future. The ex-head of CrowdTangle described this as a “big step forward” in stopping bad actors from having undue influence.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has been at the centre of controversy over the spread of fake news since the summer of 2016, prompted largely by the US election and Brexit. The company introduced measures to combat deception on its platforms in 2017, and later labeled the actions of multiple sources engaged in deliberately disseminating false or misleading information as Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour.
CIB is defined by Meta as “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation”. This includes efforts on behalf of governments or corporations, as well as activities by non-state affiliated groups. The policy is enacted via both manual and automated detection of suspected wrongdoing. A team of “expert investigators” find and remove more sophisticated networks of accounts, while technological tools developed on the back of their work handle the smaller or more obvious examples of CIB.
Meta claimed that in November 2021, they removed 737 Facebook accounts and 115 Instagram accounts under the auspices of CIB. The majority of these were connected to a network in mainland China, including what Meta said were members of Chinese state infrastructure companies. Employees of an information security firm called Sichuan Silence Information Technology Co., Ltd. were said to be involved, who have worked with the state body of the Ministry of Public Security in the past according to the Guardian. These individuals were using fake and authentic accounts to push a conspiracy involving a non-existent Swiss biologist called Wilson Edwards into the public domain. Edwards supposedly claimed that the United States was pressuring the World Health Organisation to blame the pandemic on China. The campaign was unsuccessful, owing to Meta’s efforts in removing those who spread the conspiracy from their platforms.