The CCP’s Disinformation War on U.S. Social Media

News Analysis

There are clusters of social media profiles that emerge, and they interact with long-dormant accounts. They seem to be exchanging views from the American political spectrum.

Some people wear American flags on their profile pictures, while others display images of beautiful women. Although most are anonymous, some pretend to be real people.

They spread their opinions through tweets, posts, and messages. Some stridently defend a woman’s right to have an abortion, others the right to life. While some support the second amendment, others are passionate supporters of Black Lives Matter. Some say the United States is heading towards leftist tyranny. Still more say it’s headed toward fascism.

Above all, they post memes disparaging the United States’ political parties and governmental institutions. This meme features President Joe Biden and a caption that criticizes the Build Back Better slogan. Here one finds a meme of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) insinuating that the lawmaker has financial ties with Putin’s Russia.

It would be easy for us to conclude that these accounts represent the political polarization in the United States over the past few years. It wouldn’t be true.

None of these accounts can be opened by Americans.

They are part a vast network of interconnected influence operation. conducted To the benefit of China’s communist regime, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Chinese Communist PartyCCPThe CCP, which is China’s single-party state, is manipulating Americans’ perceptions and beliefs by spreading discord on social media. Such influence operations, far from being mere propaganda, are deployed in the pursuit of the CCP’s greater strategic ambition of undermining and displacing the United States as leader of the international order.

To be sure, the CCP’s ambition The idea of replacing the democratic West in favor of a Sinocentric authoritarianism has been around for a while. However, the methods the regime uses in its overseas influence operations is not new.

Security experts, legislators, and multiple reports show that the CCP is adapting their strategy for psychological war against the weaknesses in open societies. They are also changing the way they influence people from corny propaganda about the glory and power of communism to more subtle, more insidious messages disinformation Campaigns to discredit America’s country.

Rubio, who was himself the subject of a meme in one such influence operation, said that the effort was inextricably linked to the regime’s desire to undermine and destroy the United States.

“The Chinese Communist Party is laser-focused on undermining and, ultimately, overthrowing the United States,” Epoch Times was informed by the Florida senator via email. “It is working overtime to dominate and influence Americans in academia, technology, as well as local and federal government.”

“The United States must not be naïve to this threat, and it starts by recognizing and banning the companies, organizations, and software the CCP uses to influence Americans.”

China’s War on the American Mind

Understanding the goals of the CCP’s influence operations is key to understanding why they are using social media to cause division in the American public.

The Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Power Report (pdf), which distills the Defense Department’s most authoritative assessments of China’s strategy and capabilities, highlights the development of a new method of psychological warfare emerging amongst the regime’s politico-military leadership.

The report says that the CCP’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is expanding and evolving its methods for conducting war on the mind in an effort to win real military advantage.

“As the PLA seeks to expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and to seize information dominance on the battlefield, it is researching and developing the next evolution of psychological warfare called cognitive domain operation[s] (CDO) that leverages subliminal messaging, deep fakes, overt propaganda, and public sentiment analysis,” The report stated.

CDO is described in the report as “a more aggressive form of psychological warfare” Designed to “affect a target’s cognition, decision making, and behavior.”

In short, CDO is the regime’s new methodology for breaking the will of an adversary, or else manipulating them into behaving in a manner more in accordance with the regime’s desires.

“The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as ‘mind dominance,’ defined as the use of propaganda as a weapon to influence public opinion to effect change in a nation’s social system, likely to create an environment favorable to China and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions,” According to the report.

“PLA articles on CDO state that seizing mind dominance in the cognitive domain and subduing the enemy without fighting is the highest realm of warfare.”

CCP is inciting polarization to turn Americans against each another. The reason is easy: A nation at the war with itself cannot fight against communist China.

Sam Kessler, a geopolitical advisor with risk management firm North Star Support Group, said that the CCP’s new influence operations ought then to be considered within the broader context This is its military doctrines and strategies.

Foremost among them is the regime’s doctrine of “Unrestricted Warfare,” The CCP commits all aspects to victory through its policies. strategy Leveraging the “Three Warfares” Of legal, media, or psychological war.

“[The CCP] are implementing a cognitive and asymmetrical war, which are subversive operations aimed at causing fear, confusion, disruption, and polarization within American society as well as in other targeted countries,” Kessler said.

CCP Sparkling ‘Societal Collapse’ This is US

Kessler believes the CCP has set the stage for the United States to be unable to meet a crisis. It is likely to slide into a national death spiral by framing the way Americans discuss current issues and polarizing them.

“The goal is to weaken the foundation of a society and its institutions by employing a long game type of strategy that usually targets unsuspecting individuals and groups,” Kessler said.

“This can be implemented to cause distrust in American institutions … Once these things become tainted and eroded in the long term, it is usually very difficult to repair them. As a result, history has shown these methods [are] highly effective in causing societal collapse if not just chaos when allowed to happen over a long period of time.”

This ambition is perhaps more evident than in the case “DRAGONBRIDGE,” Recently discovered malign influence operation that was conducted to support the CCP and its goals.

Mandiant, an intelligence firm, discovered the ongoing operation. found The campaign aims to undermine U.S. interests aggressively by disallowing Americans from voting, inflaming tensions and claiming that the United States is secretly responsible for CCP aggression.

The DRAGONBRIDGE operation does this by impersonating legitimate groups, plagiarizing and altering news articles, and posing as U.S. citizens eager to criticize the United States’ record on race and social justice issues.

According to Kessler, such efforts are part and parcel of the regime’s strategy for weakening the United States from the inside.

“In many ways, cognitive warfare is more effective in draining a society’s ability to be ready to respond when there’s more confusion, poor morale, and depleted mental stamina,” Kessler said.

“After all, if the internal backbone of a society is weakened, wearied, and mentally exhausted through these targeted influence campaigns, then it is more susceptible to being manipulated and controlled by foreign adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran.”

CCP Influence Operations Increasing in Frequency & Sophistication

In previous years, it was unclear if the regime would directly take action against this backbone. The Chinese diaspora have been the targets of pro-communist propaganda by the regime, and it is difficult to see how this operation can be extended to more widely sowing political hatred among American citizens.

However, this has changed. The regime and its sponsors appear to have intensified their efforts to create chaos around the world in a matter of three or four years. This is evident from several reports by Recorded Future.

One report for 2019 (pdfCCP influence operations from 2016 to 2019 were, according to a study by ), fundamentally different than those of other adversaries such as Russia.

Russia’s operations rely Bot networks and “troll farms”’ that operate in coordinated online influence campaigns aimed at destabilizing target nations by increasing intranational strife. Such campaigns create distrust and confusion among voters in democratic societies, and thereby erode the society’s capacity to respond to more overt threats from the nation directing the influence operation.

Prior to 2019, the CCP largely exploited the United States’ open media environment to promote positive views of China and communism. The state-backed CCP influencers used paid advertisement and bot networks abroad to gain favorable views.

However, another report will be available by 2022pdfCCP found that it had successfully shifted to a new phase for influence operations. It was marked with the targeted messaging of clearly defined audiences segmented on the basis of granular demographic data.

“2019 marked a turning point in China’s use of online disinformation, with foreign-facing computational propaganda increasing rapidly,” The report stated.

“In the post-2019 period, inauthentic campaigns and online personalities have become staples of CCP propaganda. YouTube, Facebook, and other global social media platforms have removed tens of thousands of accounts suspected of inauthentic manipulation attributed to China in the past three years.”

These new accounts, according to Recorded Future, likely receive guidance or material support from the CCP’s United Front Work Department, a powerful agency charged with overseeing global inflence operations, and the regime’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security.

What’s more, the swift evolution in tactics and strategy could indicate that the regime is learning to conduct psychological warfare from a more senior partner like Russia, whose own cyber tactics the new Chinese methods closely resemble.

“China and Russia have forged a very close partnership that has greatly evolved during the last three decades,” Kessler said. “It’s very possible that we’ll witness a formalized strategic alliance between China and Russia to counter the U.S. and the West more directly at some point in our lives, if it hasn’t occurred already.”

“As a result, Beijing and Moscow have improved their defense and security ties in addition to other things like economics, infrastructure, energy, and natural resources. This especially includes cyber partnerships between China and Russia in terms of cooperation and coordination regarding information security and operations between the two.”

CCP Influence Campaigns: Data at the Heart

Given the regime’s newfound focus on cognitive domain operations and its increasingly strident behavior in attempting to undermine the interests of the United States, Americans may rightly wonder what it is that powers China’s disinformation machine.

Data is the key to unlocking the truth.

The regime is actually leveraging huge troves of American citizens’ data every day in its attempt to discredit the United States from the inside.

The 2022 Record Future report found that the CCP’s deployment of “precise communication,” A method of conducting influence operations that target specific audiences required extraordinary amounts of data at the individual, community, and national levels. Further, it was necessary to adjust for cultural, economic, religious, and personal factors.

“China’s implementation of this strategy requires an in-depth understanding of target audiences, which is being attained—with the aid of international firms—through area studies research, in-country surveys, and online behavioral data,” According to the report.

Moreover, the report said, the regime’s propaganda arms were almost certainly clients of China Data Matrix, a China-based media monitoring company “that claims to have ‘complete coverage’ of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube, Line, and other major platforms, web portals, communities, forums, and blogs from over 100 countries and 10 languages.”

It is not surprising that CCP laws have classified data as a national resource and subject to communist collectivization. Therefore, they require that any data stored by Chinese companies or in the country be turned over to the Party upon request.

This need for data to fuel the regime’s influence operations also makes the presence of Chinese-owned companies in the United States problematic.

One example of the data that might have been gleaned from TikTok, a social media giant, through its China-based parent, ByteDance is used to direct information about the construction of an influential campaign by communist authorities.

Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, will head the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Republicans gain majority in January. He is acutely aware. He believes that the regime’s ability to obtain the data of American users through companies like TikTok is a key part of the puzzle.

“Unfortunately, it is no surprise that the CCP is working to sow political discord among the American people,” McCaul sent an email to The Epoch Times. “The U.S. is failing to take the threat of the CCP seriously.”

“Bytedance, a CCP-controlled company, operates the most popular social media network among American youth, and CCP entities are buying up our sensitive data. A Republican-led House is going to attack these threats head on.”

It is difficult, but possible to defend an open system

The CCP aims to influence the behavior of Americans to harm the United States. It seeks to do so by exploiting American society’s openness as well as U.S.-based online social media platforms. The threat of domestic crises stemming form influence operations is increasing.

Recent developments have shown that the CCP continues to gain ground in its mission to polarize Americans as well as undermine America’s political system.

China-backed bots were launched in November spammed Twitter has taken over regional search tags and blocked out users from searching for them. This was done to stop users seeing the it-lockdown protests in China.

A report from October found that TikTok was thriving. failed To prevent 90% of election misinformation directed towards Americans before the 2022 midterms. This includes advertising that explicitly contains false information to stop Americans from voting.

Meta will be open for business in September dismantled Several China-based influence operations were described in this opening.

China-based actors tried to influence U.S. elections were attempted to undermine The U.S. created racial hatred and stability, which was then attempted to discredit Chinese dissidents running to Congress are even attacked

A Recorded Future report from another source (pdfThese efforts will continue to grow in the years ahead.

“China’s state-sponsored influencers are almost certainly conducting malign influence operations targeting English and Chinese-speaking U.S. audiences with divisive political multimedia content on social media,” The report stated.

But, it is not all lost. Kessler says there is hope for transparency. The ability of CCP agents, according to Kessler to stir up political vitriol to undermine U.S. National Security decreases each time such an effort becomes clear.

Kessler stated that the future of TikTok There was only one way to tell which direction the wind was blowing.

“Recently, there have been greater efforts to deter the level of influence that TikTok has on the American mediascape,” Kessler said. “It will only continue to grow as more lawmakers, federal officials, and investigators associate TikTok with Chinese state media as well as being a tool of Chinese espionage.”

“Treating it as a tool of espionage and subversive warfare will either eliminate TikTok from the American mediascape or at least completely reform it with algorithms that won’t be designed at harming the social fabric of the country and its children.”

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