![]() Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned Wednesday that the pandemic has heightened the challenges for democratic states, and he blamed “unscrupulous leaders” for spreading misinformation and disinformation. President Joe Biden said it was a critical moment and called for democratic leaders to “lock arms” to show the world that democracies are far better vehicles for societies than autocracies. Speaking Thursday in Washington on the first day of a virtual Summit for Democracy, U.S. The day before the report was published, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it had removed more than 600 social media accounts linked to a Chinese influence operation that claimed the United States was pressuring the World Health Organization to blame COVID-19 on the Chinese government.ĬEPA authors said China and Russia have used the pandemic as an excuse to try to further erode faith in democracy and wage information warfare against the West, opening another propaganda front in the growing competition between democratic and authoritarian governments. China borrowed some tools from Russia but used them for different ends, sanitizing its own record and spreading conspiracy theories on a global scale,” said the study, “Jabbed in the Back: Mapping Russian and Chinese Information Operations During COVID-19,” which was released last week. “Russia largely followed its preexisting playbook of using crises to inflame tensions in foreign societies. That was complemented by an overview of research conducted by other groups and academic institutions into Russian and Chinese disinformation, which is defined as narratives based only partially on truth and purposefully meant to mislead. Army.įor the study, CEPA’s researchers assembled thousands of website articles and social media messaging from Russian and Chinese government officials and state-backed media from March 2020 through March 2021. Zhao has repeatedly suggested on Twitter that the coronavirus might have come from the U.S. 24, 2020, photo, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian speaks during a daily briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. ![]() “Even with substantially greater resources, this largely prevents Chinese narratives from swaying public opinion or polarizing societies.”įILE - In this Feb. ![]() “The largest difference between China's and Russia’s information warfare tactics remains China’s insistence on narrative consistency, compared with Russia’s firehose-of-falsehoods strategy,” they added. ![]() Russia is simultaneously learning from the Chinese approach,” the authors said. “Narrative overlap and circular amplification of disinformation show that China is following a Russian playbook with Chinese characteristics. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spread disinformation about the efficacy of vaccines and the virus’s origins, a shift from Beijing’s previous disinformation campaigns, which had a narrower focus on China-specific issues such as Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan,” said researchers Ben Dubow, Edward Lucas and Jake Morris. While there’s only limited evidence of explicit cooperation, there are instances of narrative overlap, said the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based research organization.Īccording to the report, which focuses on disinformation campaigns since the late-2019 discovery of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Beijing's information warriors largely began by following the Russian "disinformation playbook,” copying disinformation narratives, tools and techniques, but now some simultaneous learning is taking place. The Kremlin and Chinese Communist Party are learning from each other in shaping and conducting information warfare aimed at exacerbating political divisions in the West and undermining trust in democracy, according to a new study.
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