Facebook: Fake pages from China tried to disrupt US politics

Facebook says it has removed a small network of fake accounts and pages that originated in China and focused on disrupting political activity in the U.S. and several other countries.

The U.S.-focused activity was just a “sliver” of the accounts' overall activity and gained almost no following, Facebook said. Their primary focus was Southeast Asia, including the Philippines.

In the U.S, the accounts posted material both in support of and against presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.

Facebook did not link the network directly to the Chinese government. It said the people behind the network tried to conceal their identity and location via virtual private networks and other methods.

U.S. intelligence officials have identified China as one of several countries, along with Russia and Iran, who they say could look to interfere in the 2020 election. In an August public assessment, the country’s chief counterintelligence official, William Evanina, said officials had determined that Beijing regards Trump as unpredictable and wants to see him lose to Biden.

The statement said that China had been expanding its influence operations ahead of the 2020 election to “shape the policy environment in the United States” and had been weighing the pros and cons of taking more aggressive action.

Notably, though, the intelligence assessment was more specific in its characterizations of Russian interference in the election, saying that Moscow was using a range of measures to denigrate Biden and that Kremlin-linked actors were propping up Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian interference.

The question of which country poses the biggest threat to election security has emerged as a politically fraught issue. Trump and several senior...