Here, China sponsors anti-NATO propaganda on Facebook

According to an SVT Nyheter poll, pages that Facebook describes as “state-controlled media from China” have on several occasions sponsored English-language posts with anti-NATO messages on the social media platform over the past month.

Sponsoring a post simply means paying to spread the word and reach people who don’t follow your Page. This is usually done with traditional advertising – but there is also a significant amount of political content.

Ads with political content must be visible to everyone in Metas Ad library, even when the ad is no longer active. The idea is that users themselves will then be able to see which political messages the site has sponsored, how much money has been spent, and which groups the posts have reached.

But the Chinese NATO ads disappear from the ad library as soon as they stop working.

In an email to SVT Nyheter, a spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, wrote that the China-sponsored NATO posts do not violate its advertising rules. It is also written that the “Facebook licensing process” is not used in all countries, which means that political posts in all countries are not saved in the ad library.

Watch SVT’s review of NATO sponsored posts in the video above, and hear Jojje Olsson tell us what the Chinese state wants to achieve with them.