Chinese Officials Amplify Pro-Russian Propaganda on US Biolabs in Ukraine, Researcher Finds

A dis­in­for­ma­tion researcher has found a clear over­lap on Twit­ter between pro-Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da pushed by inau­then­tic accounts and gen­uine Chi­nese offi­cials ampli­fy­ing the US bioweapons con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. Accord­ing to a Twit­ter thread by Marc Owen Jones (best viewed in the orig­i­nal tweet):

March 14, 2022 Ok so I decid­ed to drill down more on a core com­po­nent of the #bio­labs fake news. What’s fas­ci­nat­ing about this is the clear over­lap between  pro-Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da and gen­uine Chi­nese offi­cials ampli­fy­ing it. Read on. So first up. A core com­po­nent of the bio­labs sto­ry was a key piece of dis­in­fo. Remem­ber, for a good con­spir­a­cy, it helps to have scan­dal and per­ceived nefar­i­ous behav­iour. It’s espe­cial­ly good if you can make it look like your adver­sary is hid­ing some­thing!  How though? Well it was fair­ly sim­ple. It was report­ed by ‘inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist’ @dgaytandzhieva  around 26th Feb that the US Embassy in Kyiv had delet­ed doc­u­ments about its bio­lab­o­ra­to­ries in Ukraine.  Dele­tion  = what are you hid­ing?? As I have said before, this is false. The doc­u­ments were nev­er delet­ed. Fur­ther­more the screen­shot used by Dilyana say­ing ‘site can’t be reached’ appears not to be relat­ed to the Embassy web­page. In sum, this new was false, but it went viral. +12k RTs! Inci­den­tal­ly, when I first men­tioned this Dilyana blocked me and did not qual­i­fy or delete her tweet.) Which at the very least seems unpro­fes­sion­al, at the most, sus­pi­cious. After Dilyana tweet­ed this, a num­ber of oth­ers picked it up.

Read the full thread here.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) recent­ly report­ed that China’s ampli­fi­ca­tion of false Russ­ian claims about the US and bio­log­i­cal weapons labs in Ukraine shows the two coun­tries are increas­ing­ly coor­di­nat­ing their dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts.

We recent­ly report­ed on Russ­ian claims that the Unit­ed States was devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons in a net­work of labs in Ukraine. These claims have been echoed not only by Chi­na but also ampli­fied by QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists and far-right Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures, includ­ing Fox News anchor Tuck­er Carlson.