Chinese influence activity targeting the ongoing Hong Kong protests has recently received prominent media and researcher attention, following takedown announcements and data releases by major social media companies. FireEye’s Information Operations Analysis team has been tracking this campaign since the protests first erupted in June, observing it unfold in real-time across multiple social media platforms as its orchestrators tried to shape attitudes towards the protestors and the Hong Kong Police. This presentation will contribute two main insights to our collective understanding of this campaign. First, using data collected directly by the FireEye team as it tracked the evolution of the campaign from its beginning, it will provide an overview of how numerous assets across multiple platforms interacted with each other in a coordinated manner in an attempt to shape attitudes surrounding the protests, providing a more detailed and nuanced picture of the overall campaign than the data released by the platforms has thus far painted. Second, we will provide an analytic comparison of the data we collected with that released publicly, to argue that we risk forming a skewed understanding of - and must be cautious about drawing broad conclusions about - the nature of particular operations and their perpetrators based solely on takedown data released publicly by social media platforms.
