Countering Chinese disinformation reports

This is a series of investigative reports focusing on China’s information manipulation efforts, published conjointly by the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab and the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security‘s Asia Security Initiative. In the collection, researchers focus on several main events of interest which include propaganda efforts targeting overseas Chinese immigrants that extend beyond China’s jurisdictional borders, rhetoric-shaping tactics during Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election that aims to sway public discourse to be China-friendly, social media curation during Hong Kong’s Extradition Bill protest to sway internet discourse, and general disinformations strategies. The reports included in the collection are comprehensive, thematic, and detailed. Moreover, they offer a valuable glimpse into the means and ways that powerful nation-state actors command over to acheive cyber objectives.

One report of particular interest in the general catalog on China’s disinformation strategy. In the report, it is revealed that while heavier-handed efforts from official channels to push a narrative that portrays a strong, unified, and peaceful China has largely failed and instead generated negative counter-movements among its foreign audience, China is employing other means to push a narrative in ways that better accommodate the local internet culture. For example, celebrities and internet influencers are hired to promote official party lines. Moreover, artificial intelligence and machine-learning methods are used to train bots to talk more like local internet users in a way that is more humanizing.