Facebook accounts in China ran ‘Operation K’ targeting India, Sikhs

New Delhi, May 31

Social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has said a network in China targeted the Sikh community worldwide with fictitious posts and manipulated images on “Khalistan independence movement”, floods in Punjab and criticism of the Indian Government.

Meta takes action

• Meta, in its May report, said it removed 37 Facebook accounts, 13 pages, five groups and nine accounts on Instagram for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”
• These groups appeared to have created a fictitious activist movement, Operation K, which called for pro-Sikh protests in New Zealand and Australia

Meta, in its May quarterly report, said: “These groups appeared to have created a fictitious activist movement called ‘Operation K’, which called for pro-Sikh protests.”

The operation was run through several clusters of fake accounts, including one with links to an “unattributed coordinated inauthentic behaviour” from a group in China targeting India and the Tibet region that we disrupted in early 2023, the report said.

Sikhs in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, the UK and Nigeria were being targeted through social media. “We removed 37 Facebook accounts, 13 pages, five groups and nine accounts on Instagram for violating our policy,” Meta said.

The social media giant said posts were primarily in English and Hindi about news and current events, including images likely to have been manipulated by photo-editing tools or generated by artificial intelligence. These were in addition to posts about floods in the Punjab region, the Sikh community worldwide, the Khalistan independence movement, the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, and the criticism of the Indian Government.

“This operation used compromised and fake accounts — some of which were detected and disabled by our automated systems prior to our investigation — to pose as Sikhs, post content and manage pages and groups…,” it added.

Meta said it found and removed this activity early, before it was able to build an audience among authentic communities. Sources in the Indian security agencies said so far Pakistani social media accounts did such targeting of Sikhs, the work being done by China was the first, or could be even a joint China and Pakistan operation.