The More China, The Less You Need: Measuring Chinese-language political misinformation on social media in the U.S.

A Silicon Valley-based software engineer from China named More Less says that he likes facts and that he is an engineer. “I think it’s my responsibility to rebut this nonsense.”

More Less asked to not be identified because his posts may be seen as harassment. His Chinese-language fact-check blog is included in a grassroots movement against political misinformation on Chinese-language social media. He has taken on claims that the 2020 presidential election could be distorted by voter fraud or that Californians were allowed to steal up to $950 in goods.

Since Russia bombarded the 2016 election, election watchers are on guard against social media influence operations. Four years later, Iran tried to influence the 2020presidential election with mixed results. Now, the People’s Republic of China—or, at least, a group with a long-running pro-Chinese government agenda—seems to be trying out its own political influence operation just ahead of this year’s US midterm elections. And while that operation seems to have largely failed this time, the campaign represents the growing boldness of a new adversary in the fight against organized disinformation.

One of the main locations for Chinese- language misinformation in the US is the messaging app WeChat. The version offered in China, known as Weixin, is hugely influential and used for far more than chatting, with functions including hailing taxis and storing Covid vaccination codes. The US version has limited capabilities, and was the subject of an attempted ban by then president Donald Trump in 2020. Millions of Chinese Americans and people with friends, family, and business in China use the messaging service to coordinate their activities. In 2022, WeChat groups played a role in the recall of members of San Francisco’s school board, and New York City officials’ decision to pause plans to scrap testing requirements for some public high schools.

“We only get the garbage. Nobody is cleaning it up,” says Jin Xia Niu, Chinese digital engagement program manager at nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action. In June, the San Francisco organization launched a Chinese-language fact-checking initiative called PiYaoBa, which posts articles to its website and public WeChat accounts that are written in a similar style to fact-checking organizations such as Snopes and FactCheck.org.

The Mandiant Account of Dragonbridge, a Social Media Account of a Chinese Painter and the Origins of Political Discontent in China

Mandiant declined to reveal in its report or to WIRED the full collection of disinformation posts that it’s tied to Dragonbridge, but the company says the posts numbered in the thousands. All of the platforms where Dragonbridge created accounts would be named by Mandiant. In addition, it describes posts published by these accounts that suggested that American democracy was being taken over by extreme partisanship, as well as posts in which violent disagreements between political groups are described as examples of ‘civil war’. Mandiant reports that a video was published that discourages Americans from voting and shows images of an insurrection at the US Capitol Building. According to Mandiant, the video says that the solution to Americas ills is not to vote for someone, but to root out this ineffective and incapacitated system. All of the content Mandiant identified in its report as part of the Dragonbridge operations has since been deleted, the company says.

“This actor has been rapidly growing and hyper-aggressive. They went from carrying out limited campaigns focused on Hong Kong to a global operation on dozens of platforms,” says John Hultquist, Mandiant’s VP of intelligence analysis. Interfering in our elections is a line that they are willing to cross.

In 2020 seven Chinese men were tied to a contractor working on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security after being indicted by the US Department of Justice. The indictment accuses the men of hacking hundreds of targets around the globe, both to carry out espionage on behalf of the MSS and to profit from their own cybercrime operations.

In recent years, Beijing has extended its crackdown on dissent to the foreign platform, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter users who criticized the government. Through Li, the anonymous voices of dissent were amplified.

Videos, photos and accounts of the protests were quickly deleted from the internet in China. The information that people in China and beyond can get from participants, witnesses, and others who knew how to scale the Great Firewall was very important to them. (Twitter, like many other social media platforms and news sites, is blocked in China, but it’s accessible via a VPN.)

The account is from a bespectacled 30 year-old painter named Li who spent most of his waking hours fixated on a chair in front of a computer and a keyboard hundreds of thousands of miles away from the protests in a living room corner in Italy.

For days on end, he waded through an endless flood of private messages in his Twitter inbox, sent by people across China with updates to share about the demonstrations and their aftermath. He posted them for the benefit of the senders, shielding them from Chinese authorities.

Li received thousands of submissions a day – and up to dozens per second at the height of the protests. His following quadrupled in two weeks to more than 800,000. Journalists, observers and activists closely watched his feed and some of his posts were broadcasted across the world.

Like many protesters, Li will have to continue to face the consequences of his political defiance. He has not returned home to his parents since 2019, due to China’s border restrictions and the skyrocketing prices of plane tickets. The easing of domestic Covid measures has raised hopes that China is a step closer to opening its borders. But Li may never be able to go home again.

When he got a phone call from his parents back in eastern China, he was already on the internet, so he was not sure what to think.

“As soon as I started to update Twitter, they called my parents to tell me to stop posting. And then they went to our house at midnight to harass my parents,” Li said.

Li told his parents that he was doing nothing but working for himself. His father begged him to stop posting and pull back from the brink.

He graduated from college as a “peasant soldier” but stayed after graduation to work as an art teacher, because he wasn’t on academic merit.

Since the brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in 1989, “Don’t touch politics” has become a mantra for a generation of Chinese. As the country started to focus on economic growth, people were bound to give up their political freedom in favor of material comfort and stability in their private lives.

Under leader Xi the implicit deal is looking more and more precarious. His zero- Covid policy has stifled business growth, hampered economic growth and pushed youth unemployment to record levels, all of which have been unseen in decades.

The Art of the Circus: Portraits of a Chinese Artist and His Life in the Times of Crisis, Suffocating Censorship on Weibo

When he was growing up, Li learned how to paint and watch foreign cartoons and movies while he sat in his chair, during an era when China seemed more open to the world.

Li said he did not seek out politics – instead, like many young Chinese who took to the streets, he was unwittingly swept up by political currents. He described himself as someone chosen by history to document an important chapter of it and pushed along by the tides.

Li would not even have been on Twitter – let alone be one of its most influential Chinese-language users – if censorship hadn’t become so suffocating on Weibo, China’s own Twitter-like platform.

Critical discussions on social issues were led by Liberal Intellectuals, Lawyers, and Journalists who often issued severe criticism or ridiculed officials.

Li became more critical of society. At 19 years old, the budding artist held his first personal exhibition at a gallery in the eastern city of Jinan. Picasso at the Circus was named because he wanted to mock this absurd society which is like a circus filled with funny animals, according to an introduction to the event.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

“I know where I am,” Li told a student who lost an account on Weibo on November 26, 2012, urging the police to shut it down

He lost his account on Weibo because he shared a picture of a Uyghur girl in internment. For her, I wanted to be brave. It was well worth it,” he said on Twitter. If I did not retweet it, I will not be able to fall asleep tonight.

After exhausting all the means to create new accounts, Li switched to Twitter. He said it felt liberated because you no longer need to use code names.

And so on November 26, when Li saw in his Twitter inbox a video showing crowds openly chanting “Xi Jinping, step down!” He was dumbfounded by the police watch on the streets of Shanghai.

I froze when I heard the slogan, but I was embarrassed to tell you that. I told myself to document it if they dare to shout it. So I wrote it out word by word (in a Twitter post),” he said.

There were death threats that Li received in his inbox. “I get a lot of anonymous harassment saying I know who you are, where you live, and I will kill you,” he said.

He ignored them and concentrated on processing the protests updates. He wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his computer when he stepped away.

He said this account is important more than his life. “I will not shut it down. I have arranged someone else to take over if something bad happens to me.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

How did the protests of November 21-2022 turn out? A study by the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFR Lab)

The demonstrations had mostly stopped by the first week of December. Some of the protesters were taken away for questioning after being told by the police to not take the streets again.

The Chinese government gave a huge victory to the protesters on Wednesday when it announced a dramatic change of its policy for the sake of public health.

When he saw people holding up pieces of white paper, he knew that he had to give something up as well. “I’m mentally prepared, even if authorities won’t let me see my parents again.”

The people from his home province can’t distinguish the pronunciation of his name and his accent, so he uses his Twitter name as a joke.

And his Twitter handle @whyyoutouzhele is a dig at Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lejian’s comments last year that foreign reporters should “touzhele,” or “chuckle to themselves,” for being able to live safely in China during the pandemic. The phrase was used in a sarcastic way on Chinese social media to criticize zero- Covid.

The cat is a well-known topic in the Chinese community. The cat has become the most dangerous cat on the internet in China.

In late November, as anti-COVID lockdown protests broke out across cities in China and photos and videos were shared over social media, researchers noticed something odd on Twitter. When they searched for the names of large cities in China, the results included scads of suggestive images and posts advertising escort services. Some observers accused the Chinese government of attempting to drown out reporting on the protests.

According to researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital forensics research lab, the Chinese government uses automated accounts to drown out protest material and it’s done in Hong Kong and other places. One of the hallmarks of such information operations is the activation of long-dormant accounts, which has been observed during this round of protests.

The DFR Lab believes that over 72 times a day is bot-like behavior. NPR identified over 3,500 accounts that have done so and mentioned China’s three largest cities at least once a day from Nov 21, 2022 to Nov. 30. The data shows a rise in the number of accounts.

There is a surge in the number of bogus accounts being created because of what new owner, billionaire Musk, has said about the company’s work on fake accounts. The Trust and Safety Council was dissolved by Musk.

Ultimately, researchers say it wouldn’t be surprising if some government-linked bot accounts were part of the activity in November. “I bet there is something in that data, but separating the wheat from the chaff is really hard.” Linvill says.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, raising ire from the Chinese government and generating significant discussion online, fan groups of Korean and Chinese entertainers used hashtags related to the visit to boost their idols’ social media popularity, even when there was no relationship between the pop stars and the hashtags, DFR Lab researchers told NPR.

Rather than focus on Shanghai, the Chinese government would more likely try to flood mentions of locations where the protests happened, say Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.

The company used to identify over 900 accounts that were linked to the Chinese government. Researchers at the analytic firm Graphika discovered a network of related accounts on other social media platforms, when they identified patterns of behavior on those accounts. The narratives would unify around themes such as support for the police and personal attacks.

Some of the bots could also just be advertising sex services, which are banned in China, researchers say. A reporter for Semafor reached out to one of the advertised accounts and received a response asking where the client is in Beijing.

It’s also possible that the bots were created in anticipation of unrest tied to the 20th Party Congress, where Chinese President Xi Jinping solidified his precedent-breaking third-term rule, DFR Lab’s Kenton Thibaut says.

Before and after the fire, half of the bot-like accounts NPR identified were created in 2022, a major sign of inauthentic activity. A random sample ofTwitter was shared byNPR with researchers at the Social Media Research Foundation. Their network analysis showed a large group of accounts that repeatedly post escort ads – not all at a bot-like level – and do not otherwise interact with other users. The largest group in the search results before the fire was the escort ad group of accounts, and it was mostly created between September and October of 2022.

NPR’s Critical Look at the China Decay-Deceleration During the December 11th Demonstration

NPR has reported that like other major social networks, it’s difficult to get a handle on content outside of the US, due to navigating non-English languages and politics. With prior mechanisms of international content moderation now degraded, many worry that the situation is going to worsen.

The number of active accounts went back to pre- protest levels in December. Authorities tracked down protest participants, local governments in China relaxed COVID restrictions and the on-the-ground protests in China subsided.