But X has barely participated in that effort since Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, when it was still Twitter, and hasn’t participated in it for months. Other participants said the two companies will send representatives to biweekly meetings where they will share notes about networks of fake accounts they are investigating or planning to take down. “They just kind of disappeared,” one said.
As a result, accounts spreading misinformation that other social media companies have removed remain active on X. This allows misinformation to spread from there and even return to other platforms.
“Anyone who wants to run a disinformation campaign is going to do it across multiple mainstream platforms,” said Yael Eisenstat, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Cybersecurity for Democracy. “Foreign influence leaves us less protected than we were in 2020.”
The last X representative to attend one of the information-sharing sessions was Ireland-based expert Aaron Roderix, said people familiar with the meetings who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Told.Roderix was suspended from X for liking a post criticizing Musk, and is suing him. Both him and the company. Previously, Twitter was headed by safety director Yoel Roth. He resigned shortly after Musk’s takeover and had to flee his home after falsely implying that Musk was friendly to pedophiles.
One result: In the months since Meta identified 150 artificially influenced accounts on X in a series of public reports last year, 136 were still on X as of Thursday night. , according to a review in the Post.This includes companies based in Turkey. These are accounts with over 1 million followers and 5 others with a blue check mark with an X indicating they are verified.
Most troubling for some researchers, all but eight of the 123 accounts Meta called out in May, August and December for participating in deceptive campaigns based in China It remains on X.
Meta said this week that such China-based companies: Of the 10 networks the company has taken down since 2017, six were identified in the past year.
“Special emphasis is placed on [Communist] “The party leadership is taking a more forceful approach to influence foreign audiences using every tool at its disposal,” said Analysts at advisory firm Exovera, who will release Friday’s report on China’s censorship and the U.S. said Kieran Green, lead author of the study on propaganda. -China Economic and Security Review Commission, an agency established by Congress in 2000 to oversee U.S.-China relations.
“The techniques include filling hashtags with junk, impersonating prominent experts critical of the government, and using bot accounts to give the false impression that there is a social consensus. Green said. “The aim is not necessarily to change hearts and minds, but to disrupt the discourse to the point where it is impossible to form an anti-China narrative.”
Meta and YouTube declined to comment. X did not respond to requests for comment.
The withdrawal by X is just one new challenge to countering determined foreign interference.
The U.S. government stopped warning social networks about disinformation campaigns in July, following a court ruling banning some communications between the White House and tech companies over censorship concerns. The tech companies are also reversing policies banning some election-related lies while cutting thousands of employees, some of whom were responsible for protecting their platforms from misinformation. There are also employees.
“The industry has kind of taken a step back. We ramped up our workforce and got everything ready before the 2020 election to have the highest level of trust and security at the time. And all of that was before 2016. ,” said Annika Collier-Navaroli, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a former senior Twitter policy official.
“We’re seeing a lack of communication between government and business, a lack of communication between business and business. We’ve been working on this for a very long time,” Navaloli said.
Additionally, investigations by House Republicans and lawsuits by conservative activists have led some disinformation researchers to study and counter the spread of online disinformation, while battling accusations that their work leads to censorship. We are now forced to reconsider our efforts to do so.
While some of China’s propaganda has focused on deflecting concerns about its human rights record, treatment of Hong Kong, and ambitions in the South China Sea, there is an increasing tendency to try to provoke existing U.S. sectors, similar to Russia’s. The researchers said that there is. China’s influence operations are rapidly expanding to more platforms and more languages, Microsoft reported in September.
In recent weeks, @boltinMich2800, one of the X accounts listed by Meta as part of a covert campaign based in China, posted links to articles on hot-button political issues on unnamed media sites. Some focused on political events, such as the Ohio governor’s veto of a bill restricting care for transgender teens and candidates’ eligibility for televised debates.
Other posts and reposts promoted far-right ideas such as “banning” liberal investor George Soros from politics.
Another account in the same network, @JeroenWolf52208, posts right-wing views on race and the Texas border dispute, as well as articles about Israeli war plans from the Russian government-controlled RT. The two accounts did not respond to direct messages sent to X.
A separate preliminary analysis of Meta’s November quarterly report on so-called organized fraud by researchers at Stanford University found that 86 of these accounts were still active on X. Two of these accounts were associated with Russia, three with Iran, and the remaining 81 with China.
The analysis, shared exclusively with the Post, found that the majority of China-based accounts pose as North Americans, in some cases scraping photos from real Americans’ LinkedIn pages, but with no real names. It turned out that it was changing. The account has many posts about China, Elon Musk, President Biden, and the US election.
“The existence of these accounts confirms the fact that state actors continue to influence U.S. politics in the guise of the media and their own countrymen,” said Renee DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Ta. “Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, researchers and the Platform Integrity Team were collaborating to thwart foreign influence. That collaboration appears to have stalled. It doesn’t seem to address the network either, which is not great.”
Meanwhile, an account said to be run by China’s Ministry of Public Security still exists on X, 10 months after U.S. prosecutors cited its tweets in criminal charges.that Posted on January 24th.
The Post linked the account @Bag_monk to the “912 Special Projects Working Group” by comparing the text of the two tweets with verbatim matches to what prosecutors mentioned in the April 2023 complaint. We were able to.
Prosecutors at the time described the unit as part of a “broader effort to influence and shape public perceptions of society.” [Chinese] government, [Chinese Communist Party] and its leaders in the United States and around the world. ”
The account appears to be associated with dozens of accounts on X and other platforms that post and repost inflammatory messages. On Thursday, the London nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report linking some of the indictment’s posts to “Spamflage,” a seven-year covert influence campaign allegedly led by the Chinese Communist Party. did.
The content includes negative depictions of both Biden and former President Donald Trump, as well as content that “appears to be aimed at creating a sense of disillusionment with the current state of the United States without any clear partisanship.” “It is included. Institute analyst Elise Thomas focuses on issues such as urban decline, the fentanyl crisis, dirty drinking water, police brutality, gun violence, and crumbling infrastructure. Stated.
Some images shared by @Bag_monk and similar accounts 6 fingers or body parts fused togetheran indicator that it may have been created using artificial intelligence tools.
The image, which appears to have been generated by AI, also depicts President Trump wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. one such graphicalso depicts Biden and his son Hunter, and was posted by 10 separate accounts. Their posts all use the same caption and were made public last year after federal prosecutors indicted Trump on charges of illegally retaining classified documents. According to Company X’s public tally, these posts received a total of approximately 16,900 views.
Researchers say China, like Russia, has also begun publishing articles promoting its political views on what appear to be local news sites. One campaign that the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab recently attributed to a Beijing marketing firm included 123 websites from 30 countries.
Will Oremus contributed to this report.