Facebook said Tuesday it has identified a sprawling online propaganda effort: a pro-China campaign that had a presence on more than 50 websites.
The campaign “appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” Meta said in a report. The researchers said the broadly coordinated postings of pro-China images, videos, comments and audio files were part of a yearslong operation that researchers had previously dubbed “Spamouflage.”
The findings underscore the potential for internet propaganda campaigns to attempt to exploit internet platforms to influence the U.S. election in 2024. Since 2016, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent China have all launched covert online efforts to influence U.S. voters.
Not to in any way minimize the evils of propagandists, as they’re pushing much more damaging messages, but that describes most of the advertising industry. It’s just that those liars and manipulators are doing it for a brand so people waste money rather than a political cause.
It’s kind of crazy that we just tolerate an entire massive industry that adds nothing to the world and is based around misleading people. And it’s a business run out of fancy glass buildings out in the open rather than hidden away.
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It’s one thing to be paid to extol the virtues of X Y or Z product and entirely another to illegally influence public opinion in another country for political purposes using lies, deceptions, and half truths.
It’s really not. Both are “lies, deceptions, and half truths” and neither is “illegal”, just unethical. Propaganda is worse because of the goals, not because it’s clearly separate endeavor.
If you lie in an advertisement, your company is exposed to consumer protection liability
What counts as a “lie” in advertising is incredibly narrow and if that’s your bar almost none of the highlighted Chinese propaganda meets it.
Advertising is an inherently deceptive business. Products aren’t really “#1”, the podcaster or celebrity spokesperson almost certainly doesn’t mean the words they’re speaking, and those claims about “limited lifetime warranties” are intended to imply good lifetime support when the limits are commonly everything that might go wrong after it leaves the assembly line. These lies and deceptions are so routine we think they’re harmless because we’re conditioned to think lying is just a regular part of business and anyone who actually believes an advertisement is a fool.