China’s disinformation campaign targets coronavirus, researcher says

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27 May 2020

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday called reports of a Chinese disinformation campaign “completely unfounded.”

“China opposes disinformation,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters at a regular briefing in Beijing. “As to Chinese officials opening accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms, the purpose is to better communicate with the world and introduce China’s situation and policies. We want to strengthen communication and exchange with the outside world to enhance our mutual understanding.”

A Twitter Inc. spokesperson said in a statement that it was working to “pro-actively monitor” the platform “to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them.”

“If we identify information campaigns on our service that we can reliably attribute to state-backed activity either domestic or foreign-led, we will disclose them,” the spokesperson said.

Facebook Inc. didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Strick said many of the accounts were focused on attacking Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman, now based in the US, who is a fierce critic of the ruling Communist Party government. The accounts were also promoting baseless claims linking vaping and Covid-19, as well as amplifying conspiracy theories about biosecurity incidents in the US under the hashtags #coronavirus and #TruthAboutCovid.

The accounts also promoted content that included criticism of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Many of the accounts on Twitter, he said, had Chinese names and posted content in both English and Chinese, while other accounts in the network used Russian account names written in the Cyrillic alphabet, possibly to deflect attribution of the accounts away from China.

On May 8, the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center said it had identified “a new network of inauthentic accounts” on Twitter, which it said we “created with the intent to amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation.” It isn’t clear if the accounts were the same ones identified by Strick.