Author:
Saman Nazari, Lead Researcher, Alliance4Europe.
This flash report was done in the context of the IDA project led by Alliance4Europe and supported by the Counter Disinformation Network. Funding details can be found at the bottom of the article.
In this report, we will show how two Chinese state-controlled media outlets have used Meta to publish unlabelled ads on social issues, elections, and politics to reach European audiences, violating Meta’s ad policy.
Between December 2023 and November 2024, the Chinese state-controlled media Global Times and CGTN’s European branch posted 101 ads. Of these, 26 were unlabelled political ads, likely violating Meta’s ad policy.
We don’t focus on the factuality of the claims made in the ads but purely try to assess if they are touching on social issues, elections or politics and whether they are appropriately labelled.
The report focuses on the Facebook pages of the Global Times and CGTN Europe, calling for further investigations into authoritarian state-controlled media’s use of ads and the extension of Meta’s ad policy to the rest of the world.
Labelled and Unlabelled Ads on Social Issues, Elections or Politics?
The difference between unlabelled and labelled ads on social issues, elections or politics is the increased requirement on the publishing pages. Hereafter, we will simply call them political ads.
Meta’s ad policy is meant to ensure greater transparency of who is behind an ad campaign and restrict the reach of the ads to where the administrators have an ID.
Here is how the process works:
- Account Authorization
- Identity Verification: Advertisers must confirm their identity with Meta. This includes providing:
- Government-issued ID.
- Proof of address (e.g., utility bill, bank statement).
- Location Confirmation: Advertisers must be in the country where they want to run the ad.
- Ad Account Authorization
- Ad accounts that run social or political ads must be linked to a verified individual or organization.
- Organizations must verify their business by providing additional documentation (e.g., business registration or tax number).
- Disclaimer Creation
- Advertisers must create a disclaimer for their ads, indicating:
- Who is paying for the ad (e.g., “Paid for by [Your Organization]”).
- Meta reviews and approves these disclaimers before the ads can be run.
- Ad Content Restrictions
- Ads must comply with Meta’s Advertising Policies, including rules against false claims, misinformation, and hate speech.
- Ads on political or social issues must include clear disclaimers.
- Compliance with Local Laws
- Advertisers must also ensure compliance with local election and advertising laws in the regions where they are running ads.
- Transparency Requirements
- All social and political ads are stored in Meta’s Ad Library for seven years. This library publicly displays:
- Information about the ad (e.g., duration, audience targeting).
- Spending details.
- Disclaimer information (e.g., who paid for the ad).
Read Meta’s page about the requirements here.
Image 1: Example of difference between unlabelled and labelled political ads.
Global Times Meta Ad Analysis
Between December 2023 and November 2024, the Global Times, a tabloid published by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official newspaper the People’s Daily (1), posted 65 ads. 17 out of these 65 ads were unlabelled political ads, likely violating Meta’s ad policy.
The Global Times has been called China’s Fox News and is an avenue of influence used by the CCP to reach English-speaking audiences (2). The tabloid often uses threatening and aggressive tones on some sensitive topics such as Taiwanese sovereignty (3).
The Global Times has in the past engaged in influence operations, including on the Covid-19 pandemic, claims about a bio lab and chemical weapons in Ukraine, and dismissing the Russian Bucha massacre in Ukraine (4, 5).
The ads published by the Global Times on Meta were primarily focused on promoting Chinese soft power through its financial and scientific development, history, or nature. The 17 unlabelled political ads focused primarily on promoting China’s foreign activities, such as making claims about the positive impact of their partnerships with African countries and the EU. A deeper analysis of the topics covered by the ads will be provided later in this report.
Table 1 shows the countries targeted by the ads, consisting of all EU member states and French territories.
| Aland Islands | Germany | Netherlands |
| Austria | Greece | Poland |
| Belgium | Guadeloupe | Portugal |
| Bulgaria | Hungary | Romania |
| Croatia | Ireland | Réunion |
| Cyprus | Italy | Saint Martin |
| Czech Republic | Latvia | Slovakia |
| Denmark | Lithuania | Slovenia |
| Estonia | Luxembourg | Spain |
| Finland | Malta | Sweden |
| France | Martinique | – |
| French Guiana | Mayotte | – |
Table 1: EU countries and territories targeted by the Global Times’ ads.
Considering that the Global Times page only has one administrator account registered in Europe (the Netherlands), it is unlikely that the Global Times would be able to legitimately run these ad campaigns, given Meta’s requirement to only run political ads within the publisher’s country of residence.
Reach
Between December 20th 2023 and October 22nd 2024, the 43 ads published by Global Times rarely reached more than 1000 views and never more than 3500 in Europe. In total, the ads reached around 36,600 users during this period.
Considering most of the ads ran for several days and two of the ads received less than 100 views, it is possible that the ads also targeted countries outside of Europe. This could mean that the main target audience of the ads was not Europe or that the Global Times social media team were not well versed in how Meta ads work. Ads targeting viewers outside of Europe do not need to reveal their metrics, meaning totalnumber of people reached is hard to access.
After October 22nd 2024, Global Times published 23 ads, reaching around 592,000 users. 13 of the 23 ads reached between 15,000 to 98,000 users.
It is unclear why this sudden increase in reach occurred. Either the Global Times team improved, they got a significantly larger budget, or they focused more exclusively on Europe.
The 17 ads that were not labelled political reached around 271,000 European users.
Content Analysis
In this section of the report, we will focus on exploring the narratives in the 17 unlabelled political ads published by the Global Times Facebook page.
China-foreign Relations
In 7 of the ads, Global Times is promoting the relationship between themselves and other countries.
One ad suggested that China and the EU are not rivals but rather are partners.
Five of the ads promoted China-Africa cooperation, positioning China as a force for development in Africa.
The last ad promoted China-Peru relations, highlighting the alleged deep bonds between the two countries.
Image 2 & 3: Ads promoting China-Africa relations and BRICS.
Discrediting Adversaries
At least 5 of the ads are attempts to discredit China’s adversaries.
Two of the ads claim the U.S. deployment of missiles in the #Philippines poses a threat to Asian security.
One of the ads discredited Japan for releasing treated nuclear wastewater into the ocean, claiming that Japan is releasing nuclear-contaminated wastewater. We have previously covered China’s attempts to discredit Japan’s treated wastewater release.
Another ad paints Western countries as aggressors and China as peacemakers.
One ad claims that the UK government has covered up an infected blood scandal, not providing further context. The ad contained a cartoon from the Global Times cartoonist studio Valiant Panda.
Image 4: image of the ad and cartoon discrediting the UK government.
Between 1970 and 1990s, over 30,000 NHS patients received blood transfusions or treatments made using blood contaminated with hepatitis C or HIV. The inquiry into the issue started in 2017 (6, 7).
Another ad promoted one of Global Times video shows called I-Talk. The video discredits the U.S. sanctions against the Sputnik parent company Rossiya Segodnya.
Image 5: Global Times Ad discrediting U.S. sanctions.
Other
Four of the remaining unlabelled political ads covered topics ranging from Tibet and BRICS, to the death of the Iranian president.
One of the ads was trying to whitewash China’s treatment of the population in Tibet, dismissing allegations that China is erasing Tibetan culture while using the CCP’s new name for the region, Xizang.
Image 6: Ad on Tibet.
Two ads promoted BRICS as a driving force for the development of the global majority.
The last unlabelled political ad in our dataset is a commentary video on the death of former Iranian president Rasi.
CGTN Europe
Between December 2023 and November 2024, the Chinese state-controlled media CGTN’s European branch published 36 ads. Nine out of these 36 ads were unlabelled political ads, likely violating Meta’s ad policy.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) is a branch of the Chinese state-controlled media company China Media Group, which is under the authority of China’s State Council (8).
The TV channel has an extensive network of influencers and social media channels in a wide variety of languages (9, 10, 11). CGTN could be equated to China’s RT.
The 36 ads published by CGTN on Meta were primarily focused on promoting Chinese soft power through its science, culture, sports, and economic achievements and China’s nature.
The nine ads deviated from this pattern and will be discussed later in this report.
The targeted countries by the CGTN Europe Facebook page ads can be seen in Table 2.
| Bulgaria | Greece | Netherlands |
| Denmark | Hungary | Sweden |
| France | Ireland | Spain |
| Germany | Italy | – |
Table 2: EU countries targeted by the CGTN Europe ads.
The CGTN Europe page has administrators in the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Greece, Serbia, and Spain.
CGTN Europe is unlikely to have administrators with Bulgarian, Danish, French, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish IDs, meaning that they would unlikely be able to publish the ads legitimately.
Reach
Between December 13, 2023, and October 3, 2024, the 36 ads published by CGTN Europe reached around 180,440 users in Europe. A large majority of the ads reached more than a thousand users.
The ad reached between 31 and 26,705 users, showing no major differences in reach over the period observed. The eight political ads managed to reach 63,973 European users.
Meta took down two of the eight ads with political content for not adhering to Meta’s policy on Ads About Social Issues, Elections or Politics, as the page ran the ads without the required disclaimer disclosing information about who paid for the ad. By doing so, Meta labelled the ad as political content.
These two ads show more information about who CGTN Europe targeted outside of Europe, including the amount of impressions the ads got globally. Impressions are the number of times an ad is on a screen, including multiple views by the same user. The impression statistics seemingly differ from the statistics we get about EU users reached, which estimates the number of users who saw an ad one or more times.
In total, the two labelled ads had between 110,000 and 130,000 impressions, significantly more than estimated by Meta, which put EU users reached by these two ads at 13,995. The two ads primarily reached users registered in Malaysia, consisting of 71% and 63% of the impressions. Around 5% and 2% of the impressions came from Serbia.
This raises further questions about why CGTN would target audiences in Malaysia with English ads from their European channel.
The additional information strengthens our hypothesis that the ads are not only targeting European audiences.
Lastly, the two ads that were taken down were part of a five-part series covering similar topics. It is unclear why Meta took down the two last episodes while leaving the three others unlabelled.
Content Analysis
In this section of the report, we will focus on exploring the narratives in the eight unlabelled political ads.
Five of the ads promoted a series on China’s green development, covering topics ranging from:
- Electric Vehicles (EVs) – promoting Chinese EVs while discrediting U.S. tariffs and future EU tariffs as counterproductive during a climate crisis.
- Solar power – Promoting Chinese solar power while discrediting the EU and the U.S. alleged pushback against Chinese solar. The video asks why despite the crises we are in, the EU and U.S. see China’s alleged leading role in solar as an issue. This ad was one of the two ads taken down by Meta.
- Promoting China’s efforts to increase green leaf areas – promoting China’s economic growth and sharing of experience on the topic along the Belt and Road initiative.
- Chinese national parks – discussing how China recently created national parks, claiming that the number of people forcefully relocated will be significantly less than U.S. relocations of natives. Concerns about forced relocation have been raised by a Tibetian advocacy organisation (12).
This ad was one of the two ads taken down by Meta.
These five ads primarily focused on societal issues, only three of which had a clear political message.
Image 7: Example from the five-ad series on China’s green development.
One of the other ads promoted China’s diplomatic relations with France, while another promoted the claim that different government models work for different countries, implying that democracy is not a solution for all countries.
Another ad promoted the idea that China has a long history of mixing different cultures, likely trying to dismiss allegations of China erasing different cultural ethnicities (13, 14, 15).
Lastly, one ad promotes an interview where the Chair of the China-Britain Business Council and Group Head of Public Affairs at HSBC, Sherard Cowper-Coles, claims that Chinese consumers love British brands and have made huge progress in protecting foreign intellectual property.
DISARM Tactics and Techniques
In this report, we have analysed two known and relatively transparent Chinese influence operations’s use of the Meta ad library to target European audiences.
The DISARM Framework gives us a common taxonomy to describe the behaviours we have identified being used by these Chinese state-controlled media and can help us identify similar cases in the future. The framework can also help us aggregate our findings to go beyond anecdotal findings and show systemic risks.
The Key DISARM TTPs identified include:
T0086.001: Develop Memes – Global Times used memes in their ad campaigns.
T0100.001: Co-Opt Trusted Individuals – Ads from both entities used scholars and experts to deliver their operational narratives.
T0097.202: News Outlet Persona – China has also created these two influence operations as news outlets.
T0018: Purchase Targeted Advertisements – Both pages purchased Meta ads to deliver their operational content to European audiences.
T0130.001: Conceal Sponsorship – Both Global Times and CGTN Europe are not filling out the disclaimer required by Meta for advertisers on social issues, elections, and politics, hence not fully declaring who is paying for the ads.
Recommendation and Conclusions
This flash report aimed to quickly highlight an ongoing issue and invite other researchers to investigate authoritarian state-controlled media’s use of ads on social media platforms.
The report highlights violations of Meta’s ad policies by Chinese state-controlled media outlets, Global Times and CGTN Europe. These activities underscore broader concerns regarding authoritarian states using social media to disseminate unlabelled political content, bypassing transparency mechanisms.
Meta is already under investigation by the European Commission Digital Services Act Enforcement team for not addressing disinformation campaigns on their platform and not dealing with deceptive advertisements (16). This case is adding yet another small piece to a larger puzzle, showing how Meta’s ad policies and moderation are not consistently being applied.
From the results of the report, we can also give some general recommendations.
Meta should have more stringent monitoring of known authoritarian state-controlled media’s use of their ad library. A large portion of these channels are already known by Meta. This is evident by some of the channels, including the two we covered in this report, being labelled as Chinese state-controlled media by Meta.
The two ads on the CGTN Europe Facebook page show that the Chinese state-controlled media is targeting global audiences beyond the ones in Europe. This could also explain why some of the Global Times ads are reaching a low number of European users compared to the number of days they were run.
Considering that Meta is failing to label almost all the ads we have found in this case and others we have found in the past, the shortcomings of Meta’s moderation could partially be offset by extending Meta’s European ad transparency policy globally, making sure that the same ad data that we have access to in the EU is also accessible in the rest of the world.
Having highlighted this issue, we also call upon social media platforms to conduct periodic reviews of accounts linked to state-controlled media to ensure compliance with identity verification and disclaimer policies.
We want to highlight how state-controlled media differs from public broadcasters who are funded but editorially independent. Both CGTN and the Global Times are mouthpieces of the CCP. Their function can be equated to the sanctioned entities RT and Sputnik.
Furthermore, there should be stricter penalties for continued violations of ad policies like these, keeping the violators accountable. If continued violations are detected, blocking these channels’ ability to post ads might be prudent.
We also recommend that European government agencies monitor this influence operation vector to see if these tactics and techniques are used by other authoritarian state channels.
Civil society has an important role in detecting influence operations and new techniques deployed by authoritarian regimes. Networks such as the Counter Disinformation Network allow researchers from a wide set of organisations to exchange on trends in the information space, allowing us to identify new systemic risks.
We also recommend a study to understand the prevalence, reach and potential impact of unlabelled political ads on European audiences, trying to identify if their prevalence justifies a systemic risk on different social media platforms.
While ad libraries such as the Meta ad library exist, we call upon the platforms to provide better tools to navigate their ads. Currently, working with these tools is time-consuming, requiring a lot of trial and error to have them display the content we are interested in.
Implementing these recommendations would not only improve Meta’s ability to address policy violations and threats towards Europe but also help counter broader influence operations targeting vulnerable regions.
Definition and Methodology
We define political content as content that promotes a political message or touches on issues of a societal nature. In Chinese political literature, this type of content would be called propaganda. While being aware that the purpose of the People’s Daily and its subsidiaries, in this case, the Global Times, is to promote the views and values of the CCP, one could argue that not all the content they publish is political.
We can understand why Meta would not want to label the content as political if the content promoted through ads is neutral news or portrayals of history, nature, scientific achievements, or similar soft-power topics. Therefore, we limit ourselves to content that has a clear political message or agenda, such as promoting Chinese governance, China’s relations with other countries, white-washing their activities in Tibet and Xinjiang or similar topics.
Please reach out if you would like the dataset used in this investigation.
Funding
The Counter Disinformation Network (CDN) is a collaborative platform that gathers more than 150 information manipulation-countering practitioners from over 30 civil society organisations, universities, news organisations, fact-checking organisations and independents mostly from Europe and North America. The network was initially convened by Alliance4Europe with the aim of protecting European democracy and information integrity. The network works to coordinate projects, respond to major events and crises, distribute research findings to actors who can use it, and facilitate exchange.
This report was written through the Information Defence Alliance project of the CDN, financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland within the grant competition “Public Diplomacy 2024-2025 – the European dimension and countering disinformation.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the official positions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
