My name is Lindsay Hundley and I lead Meta's policy work on countering influence operations, both overt and covert. My work at the company draws on my nearly 10 years of experience as a researcher focused on issues related to foreign interference, including in my doctoral work at Stanford University and during research fellowships at both Stanford and Harvard.
Meta uses a behaviour-based approach to identify covert influence operations, not one that's based on the content they share. We remove networks like these no matter who is behind them, what they post, or whether they are foreign or domestic. If helpful, I would be happy to give specific examples.
We have taken down more than 200 covert influence operations from 68 countries in at least 42 languages from Amharic and Urdu to Russian and Chinese. We regularly report these findings through our adversarial threat reports. Sharing this information has enabled our teams, investigative journalists, government officials, and industry peers to better understand and expose Internet-wide security risks, including ahead of critical elections.
As of our latest report, China is now the third most common geographic source of foreign CIB that we have disrupted, after Russia and Iran. This year, we have taken down five CIB networks from China, more than any other country. Regardless of who was behind these networks, or what they targeted, these CIB operations emanating from China typically posted content related to China's interest in different regions worldwide. Many praised China. Some defended its human rights records in Tibet and Xinjiang. Others criticized critics of the Chinese government, including journalists and researchers.
Countering foreign influence operations is a whole-of-society effort. No single platform can solve foreign interference on its own, which is why we work with our industry peers, independent researchers, investigative journalists, government and law enforcement.
Thank you for your focus on this work. We look forward to answering your questions.