And, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the BBC discovered a network of more than 1,200 faked or hijacked accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that posted pro-Chinese government and anti-US messages.
There is evidence to suggest Western governments also engage in disinformation campaigns, although the scale of their operations are not always clear.
An investigation by Reuters in 2024, external revealed that during the Covid pandemic, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation to discredit China’s Sinovac jab.
AI has also exacerbated the spread of disinformation, as images can now be more easily faked and videos misleadingly edited using text prompts.
Text generation has also improved and can create plausible, authoritative and coherent sounding fake news reports.
BBC Verify saw evidence of this during US-Israel war with Iran. While in the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict most of the disinformation published online consisted of old or misleading videos and inaccurate claims, we have seen a deluge of AI-generated images and videos since the Iran war began back in February of this year.
Carl Miller, an author and founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, told BBC Verify that state-run influence operations “amplify and exploit existing grievances and fissures – making it really hard to work out exactly what sort of effect they might have”.
“Influence operations are quite fragile things, usually, and we need to find ways of making them much more likely to fail if they target us,” he added.
