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China Social Networks

Pro-China Misinformation Operation Attempting To Exploit US Covid Divisions, Report Says (cnn.com) 86

Posted by EditorDavid from the long-division dept.
"A pro-Chinese government online influence operation is targeting Americans in an effort to exploit divisions over the Covid-19 pandemic," reports CNN, "and 'physically mobilize protestors in the US in response,' according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant and experts at Google." The operation, which initially attempted to discredit pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, has expanded into a "global campaign that's operating in seven languages, on at least 30 social media platforms and across 40+ website & forums," experts at Mandiant and Google say, noting parallels to the Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 presidential election. US officials believe the operation is linked to the Chinese government and have been monitoring its evolution, according to one source familiar with the situation....

[E]xperts have observed an "explosion of activity" across the world and the move to make physical protests happen in the US "demonstrates they are a very serious threat," Mandiant Threat Intelligence Vice President John Hulquist told CNN... [The report says] "While this attempt did not appear to achieve any success, we believe it is critical that observers continue to monitor for such attempts in case greater degrees of organic engagement are later realized by the network...." While there has been limited engagement with these pro-Chinese accounts, the operation's massive scope shows the actors responsible have "significantly expanded their online footprint and appear to be attempting to establish a presence on as many platforms as possible to reach a variety of global audiences," according to Mandiant's experts....

Cyber espionage from China against the United States has spiked since the Covid-19 outbreak began and Beijing has consistently sought to shape the global narrative through overt and covert means.
Shane Huntley, Director of Google's Threat Analysis Group, pointed out the scale and persistence of the group (despite its low engagement levels), adding "we've taken an aggressive approach to identifying and removing disinformation from this network."
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Pro-China Misinformation Operation Attempting To Exploit US Covid Divisions, Report Says More

Pro-China Misinformation Operation Attempting To Exploit US Covid Divisions, Report Says

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  • So China has way too many engineers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday September 11, 2021 @05:38PM (#61786301)
    And way too little useful work for them to be doing. Having a large number of well-educated people with no jobs is a recipe for massive social unrest. So their government makes weird make work jobs for them to do so that they don't get up to questioning who's in charge. Kind of hard to question whether you should be a democracy when you're doing 996. So expect to see more of these even if they are not effective because it gives those engineers something to do.

    • Yes, China always solved that with pointless job creation schemes, at least in the last decades. Like building entire cities for 7 miilion people that are completely empty. But hey, maybe they can do it like Japan, and actually start offering products that are superior to to our own instead of copying us... badly. In any case, that itself would not be bad. It's better to work for the progress of the country, than for utterly pointless profit for profit's sake, as in what the west considers "real work". IF a

    • TSMC suddenly gets a lot of new Chinese janitors.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        It already has them. Taiwan is overwhelmingly populated by Chinese people. Native Formosans are a very small minority on the island.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Revek ( 133289 )
      Your statement looked well thought out until I saw the fark politics url.
      • Just the articles. The fark politics tab is surprisingly useful for finding out about stories that are barely getting any coverage. It's where I found out Chip Roy got caught saying he was going to cause 18 months of chaos to win the midterms. It's also where I found that Business Insider story that talked about how 70% of middle class job losses were due to automation and not outsourcing. Or what I found a story talking about how 25 to 30% of our workforce is now employed in the gig economy. There's all so

        • You "found out" a bunch of bullshit. You wear your credulousness on your sleeve. farking idiot.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by LKM ( 227954 )
            I'm not sure how to verify the "loss to automation vs outsourcing" claim, but since there's probably a huge overlap between the two (where work is both outsourced and a large part of it is automated at the same time), I'm not sure if a direct comparison between the two is very helpful.

            However, I did wonder about the "30% work in gig economy" number, which seems implausible. I didn't find this number directly, but the US does have about 128 million full-time workers, and about 70 million freelancers, appar

    • Actually, China's courts recently ruled that 996 hours were illegal.

      https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30... [npr.org]

      Not a fan of the CCP, but even broken clocks... you know? Working 996 has got to be a living death, and I don't like seeing people suffer like that.

      • especially in a country like China with it's culture being what it is and a near complete lack of civil rights.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by edis ( 266347 )

          Since this is popular to do wrong way:
          it's = it is
          its = of it

          Eats, shoots and leaves - surprisingly refreshing book.

      • I've done a modified version of 996 in the United States. One week I would work days 11 hours Mon-Fri, 10 hours Saturday, and 8 hours Sunday (73) and the next week I would work nights 11 hours Mon-Fri and 10 hours Saturday (65) with Sunday off. So 13 days on, 1 day off, averaging 69 hours per week. While I would not be eager to repeat that schedule, I wouldn't call it "living death". And the double time was nice.

    • Having a large number of well-educated people with no jobs is a recipe for massive social unrest.

      This is especially true in China, where they are disproportionately unattached young men with little hope of finding a GF or ever starting a family.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      No, the whole point of this is to show the Chinese public that "Dictatorship good, Democracy Bad!". That the government knows what's best for you and you should never question it.

      It's a vulnerability of democracy that bad actors can influence things negatively That freedom can be subverted to ensure oppression.

      Of course, you see the contradiction - if government is good, then how is it possible to sow discord about government? Wouldn't saying to distrust government also mean to distrust their government? A

      • It's a vulnerability of democracy that bad actors can influence things negatively That freedom can be subverted to ensure oppression.

        It seems to me that the main reason propaganda campaigns like this work is because our governments have repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy. We went from doubting them, but frequently giving them the benefit of the doubt, to knowing outright that they are chronic liars and thugs.

        If our governments were trustworthy, we could immediately spot disinformation campaigns.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      China is cracking down in 996. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]

      The Chinese government is just learning from Russia, which has been doing this successfully for years. The UK does it as well, on a much smaller scale.

  • Narrative. (Score:3)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Saturday September 11, 2021 @06:01PM (#61786373) Journal

    Cyber espionage from China against the United States has spiked since the Covid-19 outbreak began and Beijing has consistently sought to shape the global narrative through overt and covert means.

    "Covid-19 did not leak from our labs, or our wet markets."

    • Re:Narrative. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday September 11, 2021 @06:15PM (#61786407)

      And "we do not harvest organs from Falun Gog and Uyghur prisoners".

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • "Covid-19 did not leak from our labs, or our wet markets."

      So what if it did? Can you comment on how Joe Public's life or reality would change if he knew the origin of Covid-19 was Chinese?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Figur8 ( 8581903 )
        It might help create more concern for international safety standards that are badly needed in this field. That seems like it would be worthwhile, since this is not the first such outbreak possibly linked to a lab leak.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edis ( 266347 )

        He does already know origin is no other, but Chinese.

      • So what if it did? Can you comment on how Joe Public's life or reality would change if he knew the origin of Covid-19 was Chinese?

        This really is the question, at this point does it really matter if COVID-19 came from a lab? What does that change? Will anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers suddenly see the light or will they continue to be dumb asses about it?

    • Cyber espionage from China against the United States has spiked since the Covid-19 outbreak began and Beijing has consistently sought to shape the global narrative through overt and covert means.

      "Covid-19 did not leak from our labs, or our wet markets."

      I don't think China ever resisted the wet market hypothesis, though at this point the wet market looks a lot more like the first superspreader event, not patient zero.

      As for the lab leak hypothesis, the only real piece of evidence is the fact that the first public outbreak happened in the same city.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Figur8 ( 8581903 )
        There is other evidence. Just because it's circumstantial doesn't make it fake.

        One way or another we can say for sure that the research conducted at that lab concerned a large number of visitors due to the very lax safety standards they had in place. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/)

        Ultimately, I believe greater international pressure needs to be put on such research labs. There have been confirmed ca

        • It's not just circumstantial, it's weak. Wet markets have thousands of peoples and animals each and every day, not to mention the transport of those animals, including bats with who knows how many different strains of coronavirus, for years and years. Yet, the one leak just happened to contain the one strain for potential exposure of only a handful of people? Not to mention that there are bat caves where people have gone in to mine guano and died from a coronavirus for years.

          The people working in the lab

          • Not to mention that there are bat caves where people have gone in to mine guano and died from a coronavirus for years.

            Yes, it is best not to mention bullshit propaganda about events from hundreds of miles away, involving a different species of bat than the ones in the market.
            Perhaps the same species as in the lab, though...

            • There's no regulations around the wet markets, and no source tracing because these are wild animals being captured undocumented, yeah? They ain't tracking these with blockchains.

              The point is coronavirus jumping from wild bats into humans is actually a common occurrence, but poorly documented for a variety of reasons. You REALLY trying to argue that somehow the wild animals sold in Wuhan are MAGICALLY forbidden from transferring diseases to humans? You REALLY trying to argue that all the thousands of peop

              • And yet, it is easily verifiable which species of bats are sold for food in which cities, and from that you can easily discover the answer without needing any paperwork at all.

        • https://spectatorworld.com/top... [spectatorworld.com]

          "The Interceptâ(TM)s blockbuster reporting languished on Twitter for a day and was all but ignored by most network and print media. They were all too busy blasting out a false story from Rolling Stone about ER patients in Oklahoma ICU units overdosing on Ivermectin. Anthony Fauci is protected from on high by not only the Biden administration but our national media as well."

          American system is a system where money is the God. And we all in rest of the world have to suffer

      • Some people have been watching TV entertainment programs as if they are documentaries. They will never find "patient zero" in real life, only Hollywood can do that. They found people in Italy had some sort of covid strain in their blood tests months before Wuhan hit the news.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      The current narrative is that it came from a US military base. And overwhelming majority of Chinese people believe it, because that's how propaganda in China works.

  • LOL. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    None of this is even meaningful. Even the article states that "experts found no evidence these posts were successful in mobilizing protesters". In fact since no one is fucking linked to these false accounts, it's like a tree falling in a forest and no one is around to even hear it.

    US covid divisions almost have nothing to do with spooky foreign actors. It has EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE STUPIDITY, IGNORANCE and LOW INTELLIGENCE OF THE GENERAL AMERICAN POPULATION. It has to do with the American's governmen

    • When you say this:

      It has EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE STUPIDITY, IGNORANCE and LOW INTELLIGENCE OF THE GENERAL AMERICAN POPULATION.

      What your opponents hear is this:

      The general American population doesn't agree with me, and I don't have an effective response to their objections, so I'm just going to call them names.

      Name-calling in any argument is an instant forfeit.

      • Name-calling in any argument is an instant forfeit.

        Refusal to call something what it is? That's called willful ignorance and it never leads to intelligent decisions.

        Most people are fucking stupid. They make decisions on emotional bases, then justify them with bullshit later.

        It's okay to make mistakes. Making bullshit excuses for your mistakes is fucking stupid. Failure to engage in introspection is how we got where we are today, running around the world claiming to spread democracy while shitting directly upon it at home.

  • I want to believe (Score:3)

    by Iamthecheese ( 1264298 ) on Saturday September 11, 2021 @07:14PM (#61786521)
    If any government wants people to start trusting what they say, they're going to have a long, long hard slog of telling the truth and nothing but. Saying masks don't help to prevent a run on masks? That's an example of what not to do. Operation Sea Spray? Cointelpro? Selling drugs, selling guns, pushing people to become terrorists so you have someone to arrest, the acid tests, that author who was convinced the FBI was spying on him and whodathunkit they were, assassinating foreign heads of state, lying about the validity of foreign elections, ignoring data about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, destroying information from previous wars, financing rebellions... The US government has a very long and very sordid history of telling lies. Is it any surprise when people won't believe them this time? If the US government wants to have more credibility than the Chinese government it's got some work to do. And it won't happen over night.

    In the mean time every misdirection, every lie no matter how well meaning, every attempt to hide negative information, twist a study, or misuse data. Every one of these no matter what the ends are or how noble the cause is only handing China more ammo. Please. Please. Stop. Lying.

    • Every one of these no matter what the ends are or how noble the cause is only handing China more ammo.

      And our very own QAnon. The response above yours shows that China is irrelevant, it is tabloid nonsense.

      Please. Please. Stop. Lying.

      It's up to us to stop reelecting the liars

  • Failing to teach our children the entirety of our history, good and bad, sans PC airbrush is a form of stupidity.

    Failing to hold ourselves to consistent intellectual standards in the pursuit of a quick buck, some extra votes, or a chance at that promotion is a form of stupidity when it penetrates into the upper echelons of government and civil society institutions.

    Allowing mathematics and quantitative reasoning to fall by the wayside as the domain of nerds and specialists is a form of stupidity if it result

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I agree on most of that. But I think there is no need for strategic rivals to take an active hand. The US is self-incinerating just fine, all the others need to do is wait. And yes, it is typical late-stage Imperium stupidity which consists largely of denial of reality.

  • I appreciate the fact that China and Russia have a lot of interest in causing a lot of turmoil in the US, but you know things might not got the way they plan.

    do they really want a bunch of mentally unstable right wing nutcases in charge of the US nuclear arsenal ?

    Sure Putin got and obsequeous shitwit in the form of Trump last time, but next time he might get a true blue fascist fuckwit who thinks "America, Fuck Yeah" is really our theme song , and if we just loose a couple of warning nukes, everything will

  • It's almost like Chinese bots decided to prove that story is correct.

  • These morons can mobilize themselves just fine. My guess is China wants some contribution in the downfall of the US and it is late to the game.

  • Now the USA knows how it feels. The efforts the USA goes to discredit and stir up trouble in other countries, notably China, have been going on for decades.
    If the USA doesn't like it, then they can just shut up and stop their own similar efforts.
    Unless, of course, this is just CIA shenanigans making it look like it is the Chinese.

  • It's interesting that we're using inherently subjective terms such as "misinformation" and "disinformation" to describe and discuss this situation, instead of talking in terms of objective facts that can be proved or disproved. Can anyone point to an actual instance where someone changed their mind, bought a product, or voted differently because of a "misinformation campaign"? No.

    Abandon truth, all ye who enter here. We only speak in terms of correlation, of probabilities, now not causation.

    By adopting this

  • I wasn't the one who said outsource all the jobs to China.

  • Foreign states, entities, and domestic entities supported by foreign states should be strictly prohibited from participating in any kind of media, education, politics, etc. Any US citizens working for them should be charged with treason. This is not a joke. We are in a raging cold war. The gullible masses are simply not smart enough to recognize they are being played.

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