China Ramping Up Global Disinformation Efforts But Not Reached Full Potential Report Says

US media report­ed last month that Chi­na’s enor­mous pro­pa­gan­da appa­ra­tus is ramp­ing up its glob­al dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts. The report argues that Chi­na still has not ful­ly used its capac­i­ties to car­ry out a “peo­ple’s war” on glob­al pub­lic opin­ion, but when it does, the par­ty-state could over­whelm inter­na­tion­al social media with overt and covert infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions. Accord­ing to a report in The Diplomat:

Jan­u­ary 28, 2022 Although the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP) has long engaged in infor­ma­tion war­fare to manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion, hop­ing to win hearts and minds around the world, Bei­jing has recent­ly stepped up its glob­al efforts, show­ing some new pat­terns and char­ac­ter­is­tics unseen before.

Read the full report here.

The report high­lights Chi­na’s var­i­ous meth­ods to influ­ence opin­ions and shape per­cep­tions world­wide, includ­ing the fol­low­ing cov­ered in the past by the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR).”

• How its domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al dis­in­for­ma­tion machin­ery have start­ed to merge and how the coun­try taps pri­vate busi­ness­es or media com­pa­nies to car­ry out influ­ence operations.

• How it employs an exten­sive net­work of more than 20 mil­lion inter­net trolls to ampli­fy con­tent favor­able to the Chi­nese government.

• How it uses fake accounts to manip­u­late social media platforms.

• How it has flood­ed YouTube with pro­pa­gan­da videos.

• How it is cul­ti­vat­ing for­eign influ­encers or local­iz­ing Chi­nese propaganda.

The report argues that even though US social media com­pa­nies have tak­en mea­sures to remove Chi­na’s state-linked infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions, it is not enough to deal with the indus­tri­al scale and for-prof­it mod­el of Chi­nese pro­pa­gan­da. It con­cludes that Chi­nese efforts haven’t yet reached their poten­tial and could soon over­whelm inter­na­tion­al media.