China is using fake U.S. voters to push divisive message: NPR

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, China is exerting long-term influence on social media in an attempt to pose as American voters and exacerbate social divisions, according to a new report from research firm Graphika.

The campaign’s activities, known as “Spamoflage,” included accounts posing as American voters and U.S. military personnel. They posted about hot topics including reproductive rights, homelessness, U.S. support for Ukraine and U.S. policy toward Israel. They criticized President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, sometimes using artificial intelligence tools to generate the content.

Graphica identified a small group of fake accounts, including 15 accounts from X (formerly Twitter), one from TikTok, and one individual impersonating a U.S. news organization across multiple platforms. The accounts claimed to be U.S. citizens or U.S.-focused activists “with grievances against U.S. politics and the West,” the report said. With the exception of one TikTok video, the accounts did not garner much attention among real online users.

Still, the activity highlights that China is “engaging in more sophisticated deception and directly targeting these natural but highly sensitive societal cracks” as part of a broader effort to “portray the United States as a declining world power with weak political leadership and a dysfunctional governance system,” said Jack Stubbs, Graphika’s chief information officer.

In its latest election security update in late July, U.S. intelligence agencies said Chinese influence operations “use social media to stomp down divisions in the United States and portray our democracy as in chaos.”

But intelligence officials have said they don’t believe Beijing has a plan to influence the outcome of the presidential election, which may explain why the Spamflage clusters identified by Graphica targeted both Democrats and Republicans.

“The accounts have generally been very critical of Biden, but also of Trump, and more recently, since Biden dropped out of the race, they have increasingly targeted Kamala Harris,” Stubbs said. “They appear to be attempting to construct a false identity based around notions of American patriotism and national pride, rather than a particular party or a particular party candidate.”

Graphika is a research firm that studies social networks and online communities for corporations, technology platforms, human rights organizations, and universities.

The findings build on another report released earlier this year by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that studies extremism and disinformation, which found that X had four other spam flak accounts posing as supporters of President Trump and the MAGA movement.

Graphika first publicly disclosed its spam-mouflage campaign in 2019. The campaign has grown into one of the most widespread networks of fake accounts on the internet. The campaign primarily focuses on spreading pro-China rhetoric, including attacks on Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters, praising China’s COVID-19 response, and AI-generated news videos promoting China’s leadership. More recently, it has also begun posting about US politics and elections. Last year, Facebook owner Meta said the campaign had ties to Chinese law enforcement.

The accounts identified by Graphika showed many of the hallmarks of a spamflood campaign, including the coordinated posting and sharing of content previously associated with the campaign. Some of the accounts also inadvertently posted in Chinese. One of X’s accounts calls itself “Common fireman” and was previously known as a pro-China media outlet, according to Graphika.

Stubbs warned that the set of accounts Grafika uncovered “is just a small part of this broader activity.” He noted that the majority of the spam-muggling network targets the US using different types of accounts. “And the majority of the network targets issues in Hong Kong, for example, or the broader Indo-Pacific region, which are not directly related to the upcoming US presidential election.”

The collective effort went largely unnoticed by the public, but it did have one success: TikTok accounts posing as conservative US news outlets and social media influencers posted a video mocking Biden in July that garnered 1.5 million views, according to Grafica.

TikTok said it removed the account, along with others identified by Grafica, for violating its policies.

“The TikTok accounts referenced in this report have been banned, and we will continue to remove false accounts and harmful misinformation to protect the integrity of our platform during the US election,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

The fake news outlet also has an account on X and previously had a YouTube channel and an Instagram account, both of which have since been deleted.

Stubbs said it was unclear why this particular video was taken down, but that a “high volume, low impact” operation like SPAMOFLAGE could get hits from time to time.

“They’re just throwing a bunch of stuff around, and occasionally some of it sticks,” he said, “but it’s worth pointing out that I feel throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping occasionally something will stick isn’t a recipe for long-term success.”