How Facebook Helped Bring Beijing’s Message to Malaysia

In recent years, the big social media companies – particularly Facebook and Twitter – have made a big show about identifying and deleting accounts engaged in purposeful acts of misinformation. Both have removed networks based in China, Russia, Iran, and Thailand (among many other countries) that they found to be engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Facebook’s and Twitter’s efforts come in response to the increasing public scrutiny of their role in helping disseminate the rumors, conspiracies, and outright falsehoods that accompanied Donald Trump’s barnstorming path to the White House in 2016 – to say nothing of the rich political harvest that Trump reaped from his personal Twitter account.

Yet a new report hints that the these efforts have barely scratched at the surface of the problem. On August 11, the Malaysian news portal Malaysiakini published the results of an eight-month investigation into the spread of disinformation through the country’s social media ecosystem. Specifically, the investigation examined how heavily slanted pro-China state media coverage of the 2019-2020 anti-government protests in Hong Kong migrated to Malaysia, and then spread widely via social media – especially Facebook.

The investigation involved reporters poring over some 11,000 posts about the Hong Kong protests, published on 384 public Malaysian Facebook pages between June 2019 and March 2020. Journalists then sought to trace the origins of those that peddled false or misleading information.

The report’s first and most deflating finding was that much of this disinformation was imported into the Malaysian information ecosystem not via underhanded means, but by mainstream Malaysian Chinese-language media outlets. Many of these were lifted wholesale from the Chinese state press, including outlets “known to be biased and hyper-partisan.” These articles then landed in Facebook’s slipstream and were carried across Malaysian cyberspace.

As a case study, Malaysiakini tracked the evolution of a November 12, 2019 report from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack dog outlet Global Times, which advanced the false claim that Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters had thrown Molotov cocktails at a school bus. Within a day of its publication by Global Times, three major Malaysian Chinese-language dailies had republished the report and posted it to their Facebook pages, in some cases with even more sensationalistic headlines attached.

Two of the three Malaysian outlets later amended their stories to reflect the fact that the Molotov cocktail was pictured burning in front of the school bus, but that the bus had not been attacked by protesters, as Hong Kong’s police later confirmed. One even issued an apology. But the damage had been done.

While the initial post by the media outlet that apologized for publishing inaccurate information attracted almost 4,000 interactions on Facebook, including over 1,900 shares, Malaysiakini found that the second post containing the apology only recorded a third of the previous post’s interactions and notched just 184 shares. By this point, the earliest version of the article had reached thousands more eyes after being cross-shared to other Facebook pages, and so on.

A similar pipeline helped channel a Chinese state media story falsely alleging that pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong and his colleagues had met Julie Eadeh, a diplomat from the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong. By republishing the articles, Malaysiakini argues, “local mainstream media did not just lend credibility to the disinformation within but amplified them to local audiences, who, in turn, shared the reports through Facebook pages viewed by their followers.”

Another vector of misinformation were private Malaysia-based Facebook pages, around a dozen of which Malaysiakini claimed were active in sharing misinformation about the protests in Hong Kong. These pages “cross-shared or published some 20 posts with identical content that were either pro-Beijing or anti-protesters,” the report stated. “Most of those posts used exaggerated or sensational language containing false information.”

Most of these posts were generated by Southeast Asia-based content farms, including one in Malaysia, which targeted Chinese-speaking audiences across Asia, and hence tended to traffic in click-ready misinformation. Many of these Facebook pages “formed networks of pages that amplified each other’s messages by simultaneously posting the same content and cross-sharing content,” Malaysiakini found. The investigation also identified Facebook pages that distributed anti-CCP misinformation, although much less than in the pro-Chinese camp.

Pro-Beijing sympathies are one possible motivation for the amplification of CCP propaganda narratives, especially in the case of Chinese-language media magnates that favor good economic relations with Beijing. But in the bulk of the cases, the motivations seem more mundane. In many instances, it appears that Chinese state messaging has spread simply by harnessing the media’s web-driven incentive: its need to ensure that the content mill continues to churn up attention, and hence, advertising revenue.

“Although the disinformation campaign was started by foreign forces with a clear agenda to influence public opinion both local and international,” the investigation concluded, “it was brought into Malaysian cyberspace mainly by local players driven by different goals.” In terms of the offending Facebook pages, Malaysiakini said it found no evidence to indicate these pages “were intentionally created to spread misinformation or propaganda for either party.”

The possible impacts of this are obvious, even if the solutions remain hard to discern. The Malaysian outlet expressed concern that in a context of increasing strategic competition and information warfare between China and the United States, there is a risk that Malaysians could be “further misled, polarized and even exploited.” It added, “This vulnerability will expose the country to more disinformation operations that could one day have greater and more direct influence on local affairs and could cause greater harm.”

In particular, it carries the potential to inflame Malaysia’s tense ethnic politics. A small but vocal segment of the Malay nationalist right-wing has long insinuated that ethnic Chinese Malaysians, whatever their distance from their ancestral homeland, are ultimately loyal to Beijing – an association that the magnification of CCP narratives by local click-hungry Chinese-language news sites could inadvertently reinforce. This is all the more dangerous on subjects with more direct political salience within Malaysia, such as the disputes in the South China Sea, or Beijing’s policy toward the ethnic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia

The story not only demonstrates the familiar effects that Facebook can have in amplifying and broadcasting false or deliberately misleading information. It also suggests that for all of its well-publicized efforts, Facebook faces severe challenges in actually coming to grips with the problem. Indeed, the problem may be so embedded in Facebook’s business model, which itself is based on the generation and monetization of attention, that it is essentially ineradicable.

When Malaysiakini shared its findings with Facebook, the social media behemoth stated that none of the posts in question had violated its “community standards.” Similarly, none had risen to the level of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathan Gleicher has defined as an instance in which “groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing.”

Malaysiakini’s findings demonstrate that governments seeking to influence public opinion need not attempt to shape media narratives directly. They can simply release a few narratives into the internet slipstream and let the algorithms, and the self-interest of a digitally besieged media, take care of the rest.