Alarm over China’s attempts to influence American elections

Hidden Chinese accounts pose online as American supporters of the former president Donald Trumpthey promote conspiracy theories, fuel internal divisions and attack the president Joe Biden ahead of the November elections, according to researchers and government officials.

The reports signal a possible tactical shift in how Beijing seeks to influence American politics, with a greater willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Biden.

Echoing Russia’s influence campaign before the 2016 elections, China appears to be seeking to take advantage of partisan divisions to undermine the Biden administration’s policies, despite the two countries’ recent efforts to lower the temperature in their relations.

Some Chinese accounts pose as fervent Trump fans, including one on

The stories mocked Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that uncovered a small group of fake accounts posing as supporters of Trump.

Thomas and other researchers linked the new activity to a vast network of Chinese government-linked accounts known as Spam.

Many of the detailed accounts had previously published pro-Beijing content in Mandarin, only to resurface in recent months in the guise of real Americans writing in English.

In a separate project, the Foundation for the Defense of Democraciesa Washington research body, identified 170 inauthentic pages and accounts on Facebook that also spread anti-American messages, including direct attacks on Biden.

The effort has more successfully attracted the attention of real users and has become more difficult for researchers to identify than previous Chinese efforts to influence public opinion in the United States.

Although researchers say the overall political direction of the campaign remains unclear, this has raised the possibility that the Chinese government is calculating that a second Trump presidency, despite his sometimes hostile statements against the country, might be preferable to a second Biden mandate.

China’s activity has already heated up alarms within the US government.

In February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that China was expanding its influence campaigns to “question U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and expand Beijing’s influence.”

The report expresses concern that Beijing may use increasingly sophisticated methods to try to influence US elections “to sideline China’s critics.”

New focus

Thomas, who has studied China’s information operations for years, said the new effort suggests a more subtle and sophisticated approach than previous campaigns.

It was the first time, he said, that he had encountered Chinese accounts that presented themselves so convincingly as Trump-supporting Americans, while at the same time managing to attract genuine engagement.

“The concern has always been: what if one day they wake up and become effective?” she said.

“Potentially, this could be the beginning of their awakening and effectiveness.”

Online disinformation experts are looking at the months leading up to the November elections with growing anxiety.

Intelligence assessments show that Russia is using increasingly subtle influence tactics on the United States to spread its arguments for isolationism as it continues its war against Ukraine.

Fictitious news sites target Americans with Russian propaganda.

Efforts to combat false narratives and conspiracy theories, already a difficult task, must now also confront the problem waning moderation efforts on social media platforms, political resistance, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, and widespread information fatigue.

So far, China’s efforts to promote its ideology in the West have struggled to gain traction, first when it pushed its official propaganda about the superiority of its culture and economy and then when it began to denigrate democracy and stoke anti-government sentiment. American.

In the 2022 midterm elections, cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported that Dragonbridge, a China-linked influence campaign, attempted to dissuade Americans from voting while highlighting America’s political polarization.

That campaign, which experimented with fake American personas posting first-person content, was poorly executed and widely overlooked online, researchers said.

Recent China-related campaigns have sought to exploit divisions already evident in American politics, joining the contentious debate over issues such as children’s rights. Homosexuals, immigration and crime mostly from a right-wing perspective.

In February, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a China-linked X account calling itself a Western name along with a reference to “MAGA 2024” shared a RT Videosthe Kremlin-controlled Russian television network, to claim that Biden and the CIA had sent a neo-Nazi gangster to fight in Ukraine.

(That story was debunked by research group Bellingcat.)

The next day, the post received a huge boost when Alex Jones, the podcaster known for spreading false claims and conspiracy theories, shared it on the platform with his 2.2 million followers.

The “MAGA 2024” account had taken steps to appear authentic, describing itself as run by a 43-year-old Trump supporter in Los Angeles.

But he used a profile photo taken from a Dane’s travel blog, according to the institute’s report on the accounts.

Although the account was opened 14 years ago, its first publicly visible post was last April.

In that post, the account attempted, without evidence, to link Biden to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and registered sex offender.

At least four other similar accounts are operational, Thomas said, all with ties to China.

A paid account for a subscription on Elon Musk purchased the platform, a verification token awarded to users whose identities had been verified.

Like the other accounts, it shared pro-Trump and anti-Biden claims, including the conspiracy theory QAnon and unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

The posts included exhortations to “be strong ourselves, not to defame China and create rumors,” unusual phrases such as “how dare we?” instead of “how dare you?” and reports that the user’s web browser has been set to Mandarin.

One of the accounts appears to have made a mistake in May when replying to another post in Mandarin; another published primarily in Mandarin until last spring, when it briefly went silent before reemerging with English-only content.

Reports denounce US lawmakers’ efforts to ban the popular app TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a form of “true authoritarianism” orchestrated by Israel and as Biden’s tool to weaken China.

The reports sometimes amplified or repeated contents of the Spamouflage Chinese influence campaign, first identified in 2019 and linked to a branch of the Ministry of Public Security. He once posted content almost exclusively in Chinese to attack Communist Party critics and protesters in Hong Kong.

In recent years he has focused on the United States, portraying the country as overwhelmed by chaos.

In 2020, he published in English and criticized American foreign policy as well as domestic issues in the United States, including its response to COVID-19 and natural disasters, such as the fires in Hawaii last year.

China, which has denied interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, now appears to be building a network of accounts on many platforms to launch in November.

Style

“This is reminiscent of the style of Russian operations, but the difference is more in the intensity of the operation,” said Margot Fulde-Hardy, a former analyst at Viginum, the French government agency that fights online disinformation.

In the past, many Spamouflage accounts followed one another, carelessly posting in multiple languages ​​and simultaneously bombarding social media users with identical messages across multiple platforms.

Newer accounts are harder to find because they try to build organic followers and appear to be controlled by humans rather than automated bots.

One of X’s accounts also had linked profiles on Instagram and Threads, creating an appearance of authenticity.

Meta, which owns Instagram and Threads, last year removed thousands of inauthentic accounts linked to Spamouflage on Facebook and others on Instagram.

He called the network he had destroyed “the largest multiplatform influence operation known to date.”

According to Meta, hundreds of related accounts remained on other platforms, including TikTok, X, LiveJournal and Blogspot.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies documented a new coordinated group of Chinese accounts linked to a Facebook page with 3,000 followers called War of Somethings.

The report highlights the persistence of China’s efforts despite Meta’s repeated efforts to delete Spamouflage accounts.

“What we’re seeing,” said Max Lesser, a senior analyst at the foundation, “is that the campaign continues, undeterred.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company