Facebook has cracked down on a Chinese-influenced conspiracy theory operation that promoted false claims made by a fictional "Swiss biologist" that the US was interfering in the search for the origins of Covid-19, parent company Meta said on Thursday.
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The company said it has removed a network of 524 Facebook accounts, 20 pages, four groups and 86 Instagram accounts in China, including those belonging to employees of Chinese state-owned infrastructure companies on four continents.
As part of the operation, a social media user posing as a Swiss biologist named Wilson Edwards claimed on Facebook and Twitter that the US was pressuring World Health Organization studying the origins of Covid-19 in an attempt to blame China.
This fake account posted that “WHO sources and several fellow researchers” had complained of “tremendous pressure and even intimidation” from the US regarding the WHO’s plan for a new investigation into the origins of Covid-19.
The account posted the same text three more times over the next hour and then stopped posting.
Some of these authentic profiles sharing the post had similar patterns of behavior in which they shared discreet pairs of URLs as text strings without further comment.
The network promoting this conspiracy theory is primarily from China, targeting English-speaking audiences in the US and UK, as well as Chinese-speaking audiences in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, Meta noted.
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While network analysis experts at Facebook found that there was a single fake account at the center of this operation, the Swiss Embassy in Beijing announced that there was no record of a Swiss citizen with that name.
Researchers found that the fake account was created about 12 hours before the first post about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Further investigation revealed that the initial spread of the “Wilson Edwards” story on Facebook was the work of a “multi-faceted influence operation originating in China.”.
Although most of the people behind this conspiracy network tried to hide their identities and coordination, researchers found links to individuals in mainland China.
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They said accounts linked to employees of information security firm Sichuan Silence Information Technology Co Ltd, as well as individuals linked to Chinese state-owned infrastructure companies located around the world, were involved.
Source of information: independent.co.uk
