Following President Trump’s increasingly harsh stance on China, numerous fake Chinese accounts have taken shots at the president over a number of issues on social media, including the coronavirus pandemic, according to newly published research.
The study, compiled by Graphika, describes the actions taken by a network called “Spamoflauge Dragon,” a pro-Chinese spam network. Before it was taken down by Google, Facebook and Twitter, owned by Google, the network of spammers – some of which were created this year – seemed to “operate in a distributed model,” the research company said.
“The latest wave of activity Spamouflage differs in two important ways from its predecessors,” researchers wrote. “First, it includes a wealth of videos in English and is focused on the United States, especially its foreign policy, its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, its racial inequality, and its movements against TikTok. This is the first time that the network published substantial volumes of English-language content in addition to its ongoing Chinese coverage – a clear extension of its scope. “
President Trump, pictured here in the White House on Wednesday, is targeting videos spread by fake Chinese accounts. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik)
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The accounts used “heavy” amounts of video footage from pro-Chinese government channels and, along with memes published in both Chinese and English, attacked the president.
A person familiar with Twitter thinking told Fox News that the Jack Dorsey-led company is lifting some of the accounts mentioned by Graphika in the report before it was notified by the research company.
Trump, who is running against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, has ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston and signed executive orders aimed at banning WeChat and TikTok, two popular Chinese apps, in the past weeks.
In response, the Chinese government ordered the closure of the US Consulate in Chengdu. In addition, China’s foreign ministry said it was opposed to the executive orders and would defend the rights of Chinese companies, according to spokesman Wang Wenbin.
“The US uses national security as an excuse and uses state power to suppress non-US companies,” Wenbin told reporters, according to Reuters. “That is just a hegemonic practice. China is strongly opposed to it.”
The network is considered “technologically advanced”, according to the Washington Post, using artificial intelligence to create fake faces and videos produced at the same time. Some of the videos produced included those that put Biden in a flickering light and predicted that Trump would lose the November election.
One particular video, posted on YouTube, was titled “When I voted for Trump, I almost sentenced myself to death.”
A YouTube spokesperson told Fox News that Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) is responsible for handling these types of attacks.
TAG, which targeted more than 270 “targeted government-backed attack groups” from more than 50 countries, including China and Russia, recently completed 186 YouTube channels following an investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.
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“These channels have mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a small subset placed political content primarily in Chinese, similar to the findings in a recent Graphics report, including content related to the U.S. response to COVID. -19, “TAG wrote in a post published last week.
In July, TAG sent more than 1,700 alerts to users whose accounts were targeted by attackers through government support.
A Twitter spokesperson told Fox News that it reveals the threats as soon as it learns from them and warmly welcomes the support of external stakeholders.
“We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with external stakeholders, including Graphics in identifying and taking action on attempts to manipulate the conversation on Twitter,” the spokesman said in an email. “While we shared during a recent series of workshops on information companies with the Carnegie PCIO, we rely on collaborative efforts to do this work, and we are growing the audience, shared understanding of this issue. As we identify campaigns for information operation that we can reliably attribute to activity with state-supported activity, we open them up to the public. “
According to a person familiar with Facebook’s thinking, the company removed a network that used “spammy tactics” from Chinese-centric content in September 2019, the same time frame that Graphics Spamouflage discovered, for violating the social network’s community norms.
The person adding the content did not get much engagement from users on the company platform.
Since September, Facebook has continued to work with other tech companies and researchers to find and remove the networks from their platforms.
Graphics, which first identified the network in September 2019 according to its report, noted that there were consistent errors in the videos. These include an inability to understand spoken English, including examples such as adding “us” to “US” or confusing frequently used phrases, the Post added.
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Graphics are not yet able to determine whether the group had a relationship with the Chinese government, although changes in the tone of the networks were noted, compared to those of the Chinese government.
“In March, when the Chinese government’s narrative shifted to arguing that China had responded better than the United States, it tweeted about the reported wave of xenophobic attacks on Chinese Americans linked to the outbreak,” the researchers wrote in a separate report, published in April.
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While the network has the ability to produce a video on a specific topic within 36 hours, what Graphika said “indicates a degree of tactical flexibility and reactivity and suggests a relatively fast production cycle,” they have not yet gone viral.
“Very few” of the videos reached more than 100 views, with some guaranteeing a “handful” of views, while others had none at all.
