How Disinformation Flows Through The Chinese-American Diaspora; An Alliance With US Conservatives

UK media report­ed last month about an alliance between the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can dias­po­ra and Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives and traced how dis­in­for­ma­tion flows through that dias­po­ra. Accord­ing to a BBC arti­cle:

July 8, 2021 Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, an unlike­ly alliance has emerged between the Chi­nese-speak­ing dias­po­ra and Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives, as Wash­ing­ton and Bei­jing clash over the ori­gins of Covid-19.  For stri­dent oppo­nents of Bei­jing, blam­ing Chi­na for not con­tain­ing the virus with­in its bor­ders is anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­demn the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.  For the Amer­i­can right, on the oth­er hand, blam­ing Chi­na for the pan­dem­ic shifts focus from crit­i­cism of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s response and plays into the increas­ing­ly neg­a­tive pub­lic opin­ion of Chi­na. The col­lab­o­ra­tion between for­mer Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non and Chi­nese exiled busi­ness­man Guo Wen­gui is a case in point. The duo has been involved in a sprawl­ing dig­i­tal net­work that dis­sem­i­nates mis­in­for­ma­tion about elec­tion frauds, coro­n­avirus vac­cines and QAnon nar­ra­tives on mul­ti­ple social media plat­forms. Chi­nese immi­grants often con­sume news bypass­ing tra­di­tion­al media gate­keep­ers, accord­ing to non-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion First Draft.  Due to lan­guage bar­ri­ers and news habits, many in the Chi­nese dias­po­ra tend to read news in closed or semi-closed social media spaces.

Read the rest here.

In May, we report­ed on the same dis­in­for­ma­tion net­work tar­get­ing US audi­ences oper­at­ed by Guo Wen­gui and Bannon.

Oth­er Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ing on dis­in­for­ma­tion attempts by US right-wing and pro-Trump net­works has included:

• In June, we report­ed that a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm close­ly linked to the pro-Trump youth group had cre­at­ed a series of decep­tive ads false­ly attrib­uted to a left­wing group.

• In June, we report­ed about dis­in­for­ma­tion attempts by con­ser­v­a­tive activists around the grow­ing con­tro­ver­sy in the US over so-called “Crit­i­cal Race Theory.”

• In May, we report­ed how US Repub­li­can false claims about a stolen elec­tion orig­i­nat­ed with a Texas busi­ness­man and his associates.