Late last year, The Drill Down reported on China’s weaponizing of social media —hiring contractors to make fake accounts to improve its image on the international stage, silence its critics, and attack its enemies. One of their primary objectives: COVID disinformation.
Here’s a snippet of what we reported at the time:
“Recently, Facebook took down 500 accounts after they were used to spread comments from a Swiss biologist by the name of Wilson Edwards, who had purportedly written that the United States was interfering with the World Health Organization’s efforts to track the origins of the coronavirus pandemic,” NYT reports. “The Swiss embassy in Beijing said Wilson Edwards did not exist, but the fake scientist’s accusations had already been quoted by Chinese state media.”
So we know China is out there spreading total nonsense on social media —that’s obvious. What’s less obvious is that the disinformation would make it into the talking points of one White House Press Secretary, Ms. Jen Psaki.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Psaki parroted a CCP talking point claiming that the spike in violence against Asian communities in the U.S. was due to “hate-filled rhetoric” about the origins of COVID —”a baseless claim that has been promoted by the CCP,” WFB reports.
Here’s Psaki…
“We’ve seen this rise, unfortunately, because of hate-filled rhetoric and language around the origins of the pandemic,” Psaki said in response to a question on the 339 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since President Joe Biden took office last January.
Here’s where China’s weaponized social media accounts really pay off —they’ve spun the White House briefing room. “Allegations of that unfounded link grew to a fever pitch last spring and were trumpeted during #StopAsianHate rallies across the country. A Wall Street Journal investigation found, however, that the driving force behind the rallying call was a network of fake social media accounts driven by the Chinese government as it pushed to undermine the plausible ‘lab-leak’ theory,” according to WFB.
The fake accounts mobilized Americans against America. A brilliant bit of cyber-espionage and social media sleight of hand. More than half of Americans (54%) get their news from social media aka a contractor hired by the CCP to tell them to go out and “fight back” against Asian hate.
They’ve turned us against us —and no one sees it’s happening.
Here’s a bit of news that probably didn’t make the social media rounds as much as #StopAsianHate:
“America’s mainstream discourse around Asian-Americans largely ignores inconvenient facts. Attacks on Asian-Americans have indeed risen in recent years. According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, anti-Asian hate crimes reported to the police in major cities in 2020 rose to 145% of the number of reports in 2019. But this refers to only 120 incidents in a nation of 330 million. This jump also runs up against longer-term trends. Between 1996 and 2019 the number of hate crimes against Asian-American and Pacific Islanders declined nearly 50%, from 355 to 179, according to FBI figures. At the same time, the AAPI population more than doubled.”
That was from the Wall Street Journal – not People’s Daily.
