Unpacking China’s (Dis)information Operations
When U.S. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, it riled up the People’s Republic of China, which immediately energized their military with land, sea and air activities intended to intimidate. But China also accelerated their disinformation and misinformation activities that are intended to shape world opinion and muddy the waters.
Enter HaiEnergy
According to Mandiant, one of the primary vehicles China used in their information operations is HaiEnergy. HaiEnergy disseminates content and inauthentic news. Indeed, the Mandiant report found no less than “72 suspected inauthentic news sites and a number of suspected inauthentic social media assets to disseminate content” that aligned with the political discourse emanating from the government of China. Interestingly, the sites are not just Chinese-language sites that are pointed at the global Chinese diaspora—the sites published their content in 10 additional languages (Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Russian, Thai, Ukrainian and Vietnamese).
The 72 sites carried names that, on their faces, projected both a level of authenticity and independence including Czech Weekly, 24usnews, EUTimes.fr and HKdaily.net. The report differentiated this effort carried out by HaiEnergy from previously-discovered Chinese disinformation efforts, known as DragonBridge, which targeted rare earth companies.
COVID-19 Disinformation
China has experience in the disinformation and misinformation department, demonstrated over the course of the past three years in their efforts to distance themselves from being the point of origin of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a CISA Insights bulletin that detailed COVID-19 Disinformation activity in May 2020. The bulletin specifically called out China for duplicitous behavior and provided a primer to readers on how they could protect themselves from amplifying the disinformation.
Uyghurs Disinformation
The U.S. Department of State issued a report on August 24, 2022 that highlighted Chinese efforts to use misinformation and disinformation to discredit credible claims of crimes against humanity against the Muslim minority population using the technique known as “astroturfing.” This involves using a plethora of social media accounts to amplify positive messaging and hashtags to give the appearance of widespread acceptance of the Chinese point of view.
Meta’s Role
In early August 2021, Meta, the owner of Facebook, shut out New York University researchers who were looking at how political ads were handled by the company. Their efforts in dealing with misinformation and disinformation remain puzzling to many, given the bread crumbs which highlighted how the company’s social media platform was successfully manipulated.
Plausible Deniability
The Mandiant report also touched on how the HaiEnergy disinformation effort used third-party infrastructure to provide both a bit of operational cover and separation and also appeared to be more legitimate given the lack of a direct link to the PRC government. The China Strategic Support Force Network Systems Department is linked to China’s information warfare capabilities.
The Chinese tactics, according to Geopolitical Monitor, use three complementary strategies: “Creating original content and disseminating it throughout Taiwan’s social media platforms via fake accounts, reposting content originating from within Taiwan with the intention of popularizing and recirculating it and using Taiwanese content farms with links to the mainland to elevate the profile of negative postings levied toward a particular person, position or issue.”
Rand’s Research
In 2021, Rand published a comprehensive piece that foretold much of the efforts by China to shape narratives in their Chinese Disinformation Efforts in Social Media report. The piece concluded that “China’s growing facility with disinformation campaigns conducted via social media is part of its broader pattern of employing technical reconnaissance and psychological, legal and public opinion warfare (the three warfares) as part of its information operations …” The Rand report is prescience at its best; China is doing just that and shows no signs of stopping.
