Chinese Disinformation Effort Spreading Everywhere: The Internet’s Mold

Two Chinese embassy officials shared tweets about the cultural divide in the US and support for Black Lives Matter that were posted by the Twitter account of Utah business coach Spencer Taggart, resulting in significant attention.

But Taggart didn’t tweet and hasn’t been on the social media platform, now called X, for five years. Instead, his identity had been hijacked by a huge pro-China propaganda network, according to the social media analysis company Graphika.

“It’s a similar feeling to being robbed,” Taggart said, speaking from Hawaii after Bloomberg News alerted him to the fake account. “If they thought I was promoting communism and hatred of our country, and they really thought I was saying that, how terrible.”

Taggart’s unusual saga is part of what Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. say is the largest-ever disinformation campaign in China. Designed to promote Chinese politics, criticize dissidents and mock Westerners, it has infiltrated every corner of social media: Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, TripAdvisor, Pinterest and even devices like Gabi, according to researchers.

Few people click on posts from fake campaign accounts and find them more annoying in their social media feeds, the researchers said. However, law enforcement officials warn that the group behind them has effectively targeted Chinese dissidents in the United States.

Earlier this year, Meta announced the “largest single takedown” of accounts, all belonging to the so-called “Spamouflage Dragon” account. Meta, which has tied the group to the Chinese government, says its researchers found its publications on 50 different social media platforms. Google said it had removed 160,000 accounts associated with a group it calls “Dragonbridge.”

Still, fake accounts keep popping up.

“We sometimes joke that Spamouflage is ‘the mold of the Internet,'” says Libby Lange, an analyst at Graphika.

The high-profile attempts to get rid of it show how difficult it is to prevent foreign propaganda efforts from reaching social media users in the West. And while the group may seem incompetent at times, a senior law enforcement official warned that it could become a bigger problem because of the Chinese government’s resources.

“We should still be concerned because if they ever get really good at spreading disinformation, that would be really terrible for the West,” said Roman Rozhavsky, division chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China “always opposes the creation and dissemination of disinformation.”

“I’ve seen that there’s a lot of disinformation about China in the U.S. on social media,” he said. “Some US officials, lawmakers, media and organizations have produced and spread a large amount of disinformation against China without evidence, ignoring the basics.”

The spamouflage is just one of the disinformation campaigns spreading from China, researchers say. Last month, Meta deleted thousands of Facebook accounts posing as Americans and talking about abortion and health care.

According to the FBI’s Rozhavsky, China’s online targeting of dissidents has increased with persecution and physical threats. Among them is exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who was described in a YouTube video as a “big hemorrhoid,” according to Graphika. His attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this year, US authorities filmed the operation of a Chinese troll farm while 34 Chinese National Police officers were accused of harassing US residents. Prosecutors alleged that a unit of China’s Ministry of Public Security operated the troll farm to attack dissidents and spread propaganda to sow divisions in the United States.

U.S. officials did not name the group Spamouflage and did not comment because the case is pending. But speaking to reporters earlier this year, Meta said the troll farm was Spamouflage.

Spamouflage’s efforts aren’t limited to the US either. The Canadian government revealed this fall that Spamouflage allegedly targeted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other cabinet members in a disinformation campaign that included allegations that a critic of the Chinese Communist Party of Canada had accused members of parliament of criminal and ethical violations.

Meta’s director of global threat intelligence, Ben Nimmo, said he first came across the group in 2019. He went through millions of tweets sharing Chinese-subtitled videos criticizing exiled businessman Guo and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

Even then, some of the group’s tactics seemed strange to him. Some of the account names — like Bathsheba Lyons and Gonzales Swindlehurst — didn’t sound like typical Chinese supporters. The fake accounts interacted with each other to give the impression of a genuine conversation, varying between mundane topics and controversial political topics, he said.

This behavior spawned the name Spamouflage Dragon because the accounts used spam to disguise political messages, Nimmo said.Read more: US charges of harassment of Chinese dissidents abroad

Researchers at Meta and Google have linked the accounts to China by monitoring their online interactions and content, noting that many of the posts are made there during work hours. According to researchers, the people behind the accounts also sometimes forgot to remove information about their location and unit from YouTube videos.

Some of Spamouflage’s posts are more comical than convincing.

Shane Huntley, head of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, recalled one YouTube video that claimed the inferiority of Western food meant the West was morally bankrupt. The video added: “Perfect Chinese food with its cohesion of flavors shows the superiority of Chinese culture,” Huntley said. Spamouflage tried to attract attention on the social network Gab by denouncing the Capitol Riots. But the posts didn’t gain much traction because Gab is home to far-right influencers, said C. Shawn Eib, director of research at Alethea, which detects misinformation and social media manipulation.

In recent years, the group has developed. According to Graphika, for example, last year it introduced AI-generated avatars to make their profiles look more realistic and used deep news anchors to share fake articles.

More recently, Spamouflage has been spotted on a niche social platform, including fan fiction sites and TripAdvisor. According to a TripAdvisor spokesperson, the travel site has blocked 3,500 attempts by Spamouflage to post content, leading its trust and security team to monitor the group.

“It’s the largest known covert influence operation in the world,” Nimmo said. “It’s big, but clumsy and keeps tripping.”

As for Taggert, he said the account impersonating him has been removed, but he has no other recourse. “As much as I would like to take action, I am not going to go after the disinformation campaign of China’s largest underground army,” he said.