Operation Naval Gazing
This operation was shut down by facebook and a full analysis was conducted by Graphika.[1]
Key takeaways
· Chinese disinformation campaign, unclear if it was the state or private citizens
· In operation from 2016- September, 2020
· Consisted of 155 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, 9 groups and 6 Instagram accounts
· Operation covered a wide variety of topics in many different countries but its main interest was in naval issues
Overview
The campaign began in late 2016 first posting about Taiwan. In early 2018 they began posting about the Philippines and created pages covering the South China Sea. In 2019-2020 the operation ran accounts that posed as Americans in support of various political candidates, and the operation did not have any single preferred candidate.
The campaign’s ideology was consistently aligned with the CCP and it frequently cited CCP websites. Non-political content appeared to be original. The campaign covered topics like the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, Indonesian politics, Hong Kong, The Philippines, defending China from allegations and attacking the U.S. Most Mandarin sources were from pro-CCP outlets. The campaign had express partisan views, they were anti-Tsai Ying-Wen in Taiwan, pro- Joko Widodo in Indonesia, pro-Duterte in the Philippines, and in the U.S. had pro-Trump, pro-Biden, and pro-Pete Buttigieg accounts. The U.S. accounts were barely active. The English posts often were unidiomatic. The Philippines operation was far more successful and drew from mainstream media but added their own comments under the headlines.
The campaign created fake accounts and pages. They often acquired accounts in one name and renamed and repurposed these accounts. They utilized Generative Adversarial Networks to create fake images. The campaign showed no signs of inorganic growth and instead grew steadily over time.
The campaign had relatively limited activity on pages, with just over 4,300 posts. The campaign appears most successful in the Philippines. They had 1.6 million interactions but Solid Sarah Z Duterte generated more than half. The groups were highly active with over 134,800 posts. The Solid Sarah Z Duterte 2022 group had 115,201 posts with 9.1 million interactions. The campaign was taken down by Facebook on September 22, 2020.
