Meta, a leading social media platform, has published its inaugural adversaries threat report for the first quarter. The report offers comprehensive insights into communities and pages posing potential global threats. Within this report, Meta disclosed the removal of 37 Facebook accounts, 13 Pages, five Groups, and 9 Instagram accounts due to violations of policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior.
Originating from China, this network targeted the global Sikh community across several nations including Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the UK, and Nigeria. The network’s activities encompassed various platforms, including Meta’s services, Telegram, and X (previously Twitter). These actions involved multiple clusters of fake accounts associated with an unattributed coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) network traced back to China, which had previously targeted India and the Tibet region and was disrupted by Meta in early 2023.
The network employed various deceptive tactics, including the creation of fake accounts to deceive users. Meta has been proactive in combating these threats by removing such pages and communities. Despite the use of profile photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GAN) for their fake accounts, Meta’s detection capabilities remain intact.
Furthermore, a deceptive network originating from China circulated poster images—presumably AI-generated—for a fictitious pro-Sikh activist movement dubbed Operation K.