China Increases Reach Of Its Influence Operations, Surpassing Russia’s

US media is report­ing that through a com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al scale and tech­no­log­i­cal clout, China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty is increas­ing the reach of its influ­ence oper­a­tions, sur­pass­ing even the Kremlin’s malign activ­i­ties. Accord­ing to a report in The Diplomat:

Novem­ber 16, 2021 The Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP) has long sought to influ­ence the media and infor­ma­tion spaces in oth­er coun­tries, deploy­ing a diverse set of tools to achieve its aims. Yet for many years there was no sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that Chi­na-linked actors were engag­ing in aggres­sive dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns on glob­al social media plat­forms like the one pur­sued by Moscow ahead of the 2016 U.S. elec­tions.  Since 2019, that pic­ture has changed. Mul­ti­ple inves­ti­ga­tions and large-scale take­downs of inau­then­tic accounts have demon­strat­ed that pro-Bei­jing forces are indeed car­ry­ing out a broad range of manip­u­la­tive activ­i­ties on glob­al social media plat­forms. More­over, they are con­stant­ly adapt­ing their tac­tics to max­i­mize effi­ca­cy.  A new set of inves­ti­ga­tions on the top­ic have been pub­lished over the past six months. Col­lec­tive­ly, the find­ings point to an unpar­al­leled scale of activ­i­ty – sur­pass­ing even the Kremlin’s – with impor­tant impli­ca­tions for glob­al search results, mobile phone users world­wide, and domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and elsewhere.

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Accord­ing to the report, China’s infor­ma­tion manip­u­la­tion activ­i­ties have reached an unmatched scale, with Chi­na-linked pro­duc­ers con­stant­ly renew­ing the sup­ply of con­tent even as glob­al plat­forms remove accounts and chan­nels that are iden­ti­fied as inauthentic.