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And, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the BBC discovered a network of more than 1,200 faked or hijacked accounts<\/a> on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that posted pro-Chinese government and anti-US messages.<\/p>\n There is evidence to suggest Western governments also engage in disinformation campaigns, although the scale of their operations are not always clear.<\/p>\n An investigation by Reuters in 2024, external<\/span><\/a> revealed that during the Covid pandemic, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation to discredit China’s Sinovac jab.<\/p>\n And Meta has previously removed an influence campaign originating from France that targeted a number of countries in Africa, external<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n AI has also exacerbated the spread of disinformation, as images can now be more easily faked and videos misleadingly edited using text prompts. <\/p>\n Text generation has also improved and can create plausible, authoritative and coherent sounding fake news reports.<\/p>\n 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.<\/a><\/p>\n 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”.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n