How the CCP Sows Confusion and Discord in the West: Sarah Cook

When we look at these disinformation campaigns, they're doing things to just mess things up in a democracy, pretending to be voters and amplifying existing polarization, to actively sow confusion and discord in foreign democracies. From fake online personas to manipulated audio and deepfakes, the Chinese regime is becoming more creative about how they manipulate Americans, Canadians, Taiwanese and other targets online. A deepfake video comes out making it seem like he's doing illicit drugs. It was amplified by a variety of this network of fake accounts that is tied to the Chinese government and the Communist Party. Independent China researcher Sarah Cook has been studying the Chinese regime's online campaigns for years. She says there are five key tactics the regime uses to influence our media and the global information space. All it takes is one real journalist to be convinced or duped or whatever you want to say. It starts to get into the ordinary media ecosystem. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Sarah Cook, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's nice to be here, Jan. Sarah, you're my go-to person for how the Chinese Communist Party uses its influence, especially in the whole sphere of media. Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the advent of generative AI. I was just playing with the new Grok features. It's absolutely astonishing. This is something that's been used by the Chinese regime more recently in a number of quite notable cases, these deepfakes. Why don't you jump in and tell me about that? The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to influence the media around the world for many, many years. I think what we've seen is over the last decade, it's intensified and it's become more sophisticated and more coercive and covert. Just to give a few examples that we've seen, Taiwan is always the number one target for the Chinese Communist Party. They had elections in January. There's a whole slew of examples. Just to give one example, one deepfake that was published and disseminated by these networks of accounts that seemed to be aligned with the Chinese government was a video that was a US congressman that actually done a real interview about Ukraine in 2022. But lo and behold, in the run-up to the Taiwanese election, this video pops up of footage on TikTok, but now he's not talking about Ukraine. He's making it sound that if the party that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like in Taiwan wins the election, the US will amplify military aid to Taiwan in a way that sounds kind of warmongering. It's basically playing into the CCP narrative for Taiwanese voters. If you vote for this party, it's going to be war. If you vote basically for the other party that's more sympathetic to Beijing, then we'll have peace. And this video and there was AFP, the fact check actually debunked it, but it was basically a video of a US congressman and they altered the audio sound of his voice and they tried to change his lips moving to make it sound that he was making these comments saying like he was endorsing one side in the Taiwanese election. In another example, in Canada, actually, there was a situation where, and this was kind of like a let's kill two birds with one stone, because there have been a number of campaigns in Canada of China-linked accounts trying to harm the reputation of members of the legislature and MPs in particular. And this was a series of videos and posts where they pretended to be a Chinese dissident from Canada, making all kinds of claims about ethical and criminal violations, targeting a slew of Canadian politicians from across the political spectrum. But it also included these deep fake videos, videos that look like this activist saying some of these things, but also saying things that would discredit him, making it sound like he was saying very disparaging and racist things about Muslims, for example. And then one of the most recent examples was actually just last month, this time in the Philippines, so you can really see how global these tactics are. And this related to the current president of the Philippines, Marcos Jr. On the day of his State of the Union address, a video comes out making it look like he's doing illicit drugs. And it actually turns out that the video was posted by some Filipino activists who are supportive of the former president. And it was a fake video that had been altered, but it was amplified by a counseling to the Chinese government. And they did that probably because they really don't like Marcos Jr., because he's taken a much stronger stance in terms of China's incursions in the South China Sea. So you see all of these different layers of potential tactics and manipulation that can be deployed. And in these examples, they have been deployed with regards to elected officials in a variety of different countries. Like you said, this is just one piece, but a very convincing piece. There's AI that will change the language someone is speaking with and alter the lips to make it look like they're speaking my language. It looks incredibly convincing. I've seen it with people I know personally. But this is just one of a huge, let's call it a toolkit of methods that the European Union is using. I want to give people a whole picture of how all this works. Sure. Essentially, the Chinese government and Communist Party have a long track record of wanting to influence media and information around the world. And this has intensified over the last decade or two. But one project that I worked on a report for Freedom House, we looked at the situation in 30 countries. Now, the United States and Taiwan were the top two targets, but pretty high up there were places like the Philippines that I mentioned, Nigeria, Argentina, Kenya. So it really is a global phenomenon. Now, this is one very small sliver, like we said, these kind of we would call disinformation campaigns and content manipulation. But it really is only part of a toolbox. So you can think of it as like five buckets of how they try to influence the media and information sphere outside. One is propaganda. And I think that we that's all the Chinese state media. A lot of times it's a little bit more obvious that it's actually a Chinese state entity, but they kind of also insert and piggyback on local media. They put their inserts, these China Watch supplements. And again, that's actually really all over the world. We counted 130 outlets in 30 countries where they were doing that type of stuff. So that's one set. Then you have this element of the disinformation. And let me jump in actually, because this word disinformation has been kind of much abused over the last while, right? And in some cases, people use this term just to reflect just content they don't like is disinformation. What do you mean when you say disinformation? So I think one key element is that there's a deliberate spreading of falsehoods, like this is false content or misleading. Sometimes it's a mix. Increasingly, they're actually doing a mix of truth and false, which makes it harder to debunk. But there's that element of there's a clear effort here to mislead. On top of that, often the tactics being used to spread this content are coordinated and inauthentic. So that's where you see these networks of fake accounts on social media, or you see people who are social media influencers, and it turns out that they're being funded or otherwise supported by the regime or some other kind of collaboration. And you start to see content appearing simultaneously in this surge across like six different platforms, right? So that's what we mean, especially when we talk about these disinformation campaigns, or what are called sometimes influence operations, or you'll hear CIB, coordinated inauthentic behavior on social media platforms. That's usually what I kind of really try to look at when you look at these disinformation and disinformation campaigns. It's really a coordinated and multifaceted effort here to deceive news consumers and social media users in a particular country or even in multiple countries. So I'd say you have propaganda, you have the disinformation, that's a relatively new phenomenon. The Russians have been doing it for a lot longer. China kind of got in the game around 2017. Then you have the censorship side. So propaganda and disinformation are trying to push certain content out. Censorship is where all of these different elements of the way the Chinese government has leveraged, whether it's economic or bullying or violence, or cyber attacks, to try to suppress content they don't want. And then you get to situations where you have companies with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party actually controlling the dissemination infrastructure. So now you're not necessarily talking about how they're trying to suppress content on some foreign-owned television station. Now you're talking about Chinese companies that are actually running the digital television networks in parts of Africa, or are in charge of an app like WeChat or TikTok or other things. So that's a different way in which manipulation can happen. And then the last, and this you see a little bit more in the global south, is actually trainings, trying to export the CCP's model of information control that they use domestically and train foreign officials on how to guide public opinion and things like that. So you really see this massive effort that actually deploys multiple parts of the party apparatus too, and the bureaucracy, and various layers of proxies often. But where the ultimate goal is basically to make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party, disparage the enemies, make China look good, and I think increasingly, especially when we look at the sliver of the disinformation campaigns, to actively sow confusion and discord in foreign democracies. Hello everyone. We're on the cusp of the US presidential election. Whatever the result, it will have major consequences for the US, for Canada, and frankly, the whole world. On election day, I'll be sitting down for a live discussion with some brilliant thinkers, including my good friend, economist Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute fellow Tom Harrington, and Cooper Davis with the Intercompass Initiative. This all starts at 2pm Eastern. Join our live stream right here on YouTube or on Epoch TV. In the evening, I'll be joining NTD's special live coverage of the election from our Brownstone Institute watch party. Our live coverage will begin at 6pm Eastern and continue into the night as results come in. Get straightforward, first-hand live updates on what's happening from the reporters on the ground, without the bias, hyperbole, or hidden agendas. We'll see you all there. Now back to the interview. Sarah, one of the things I'm aware of, it's kind of shocking and in some cases so stark, is these fake impersonations of apparent US voters. Can you tell me about that? Sure. That is one phenomenon that's actually become more frequent. From the takedown reports or analysis reports from Microsoft or Meta, you really see this starting to be more widely used. It started a bit around 2020, midterm elections 2022, and now in the run up to 2024 being used more. Just to give a few examples, these are actual accounts, fake personas who will pretend to be American voters. Sometimes what they'll be posting is just very kind of more incendiary, inflammatory, polarizing content on both sides of the political spectrum. Sometimes that's where you see some of the AI-generated memes that come up. In other cases, and in some cases, they actually are using the same personas across multiple platforms. Of course, that makes it look more real. One example in one of the recent reports was about accounts impersonating US military families. Then one of these accounts actually started a petition about US policy towards Taiwan and trying to have less US support for Taiwan. It got 300 signatures. These are trying to impersonate real people and Americans. You can see the petitions got a Taiwan but a lot of the content has nothing to do with Taiwan. It's about racial issues, about other divisive social issues in the United States, really not necessarily anything where you would see a footprint related to China. We're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back. We're back with independent China researcher and consultant, Sarah Cook. One of the things that strikes me is, of course, we've covered at the Epoch Times a lot about various persecuted minorities, specifically transnational repression. We've talked about that in the past as well. Exactly this toolkit is used across the board, and I know this is something you've written about and talked about. Give me a picture of what that looks like. When we look at these disinformation campaigns, I would say there are three main targets that the Chinese government has. You have this subset where it is related to elected officials. It's still relatively small, though. Again, like we were talking about, it's a latent capacity. We see what they can do. Another is where they're doing things to just mess things up in a democracy, pretending to be voters and amplifying existing polarization. The third is where they're targeting who they perceive to be the CCP enemies. For example, over the last few years, you had actually an American YouTuber who went to China. This was at the height of not only allegations, but documentation about massive detentions of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, and families disappearing, people in such huge numbers. The Chinese government is trying to fend off these accusations. Then you have this American YouTuber go to China and go to Urumqi and talk to these Uyghurs. They show how happy they are, and so on and so forth. Later, it turns out that trip was actually paid for by a Chinese state media. That's just one example. Then you see with regards to Tibetans also, and Hong Kongers. That being a community that's also been targeted by, first of all, there's a lot of different cyber attacks. There's also sometimes impersonations of accounts and things like that. One of the recent takedowns that Meta did earlier, I think it was Meta earlier this year, Meta or Microsoft, I think it was Meta. There were accounts of people pretending to be Tibetan activists, and even a fake Human Rights Watch advisor, who were posting all of these allegations about the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, claiming corruption, claiming pedophilia, and things like that. That's, again, this element of trying to discredit these enemies of the CCP. I think one thing we were talking about earlier was this report that just came out this last week by the Falun Dafa Information Center, talking about a new campaign targeting Falun Gong practitioners in the Falun Gong community. It's like internal leaked documents talking about the broader architecture and planning. Three of the tactics that they mentioned, two that they've observed already, are some very suspicious YouTubers posting content that some of it is blatantly false. Some of it is this weird mixture of false and maybe true. It's hard to know. Defaming Falun Gong and also the Shen Yun Performing Arts Company. Then you've got examples of account impersonations on X. We can talk more in general about this tactic of impersonation because it's used pretty widely also by the CCP. That starts to get very suspicious. Now you're seeing two things. Uh-oh, there's something more bigger. This isn't just one or two people spouting things off. Now we've got these account impersonations. Then they get these internal documents that are talking about how the Ministry of Public Security is saying, we should fully support these YouTubers. We should feed them information. We should use the quote, 50-cent party, which is one way of referring to troll accounts and fake accounts to amplify them. We should also actually, a Chinese state think tank talking about, oh, we should start to try to manipulate search engines too. I think they use the word defamatory actually, like information about Falun Gong to search results globally worldwide. That's where you start to see these multi-layer campaigns in some case, again, targeting these communities outside of China. There's lots of Falun Gong practitioners, lots of disinformation inside China targeting Uyghurs and Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners. We're talking about these communities outside of China and the CCP trying to influence public opinion towards these groups so that they don't get some of the support on the human rights atrocities they're facing, but also because some of these are some of the most vocal and critical voices outside of China being critical of the Chinese government. Basically, the CCP using these tactics to discredit their enemies. How prevalent? In this FDI report, there are these two YouTubers that are specifically identified as great tools to amplify the regime message. How common is that type of use of social media influencers? I think this is one of those really tricky things to document. You know it's happening and it's really hard to document because it's actually happening off platform. It's like people being co-opted offline and then manifesting in online content, sometimes with someone seeming to be an authentic person. Sometimes real influencers who have other content that they're posting, but now they've been asked to do this. When we were doing the research for the Beijing's Global Media Influence Report, sometimes you can get these tips of the iceberg. One example is the one I gave earlier about Xinjiang. There was another example, and this is to the credit of two American YouTubers who followed the breadcrumbs given by the CCP-linked entity and then exposed it. An email was sent to 100 English-language YouTubers from a company in Hong Kong, claiming that there was a promotional opportunity related to share some content about tourism in China. They're like, this seems kind of suspicious. We're going to pretend we want to do it. Then they get the response, well actually that campaign is full, but we have another client and we would like to offer you $2,000 to put this prepared material we'll give you, basically claiming that COVID originated in the U.S. deer population. These two YouTubers actually said, well no, but they have this whole stream of emails and they exposed it. They basically did like two episodes, talking about two videos on each of their own channels, talking about that this is what the Chinese government had been approaching them and approaching others to do. Now one of the things, even when there isn't necessarily a direct monetary or funding, well the PRC's got a whole lot of fake accounts, right? YouTube is often, and some of these websites are based on monetization. Sometimes a quid pro quo, even if it's not necessarily outlined, could be, well I know that if I post this, it might get really amplified. Suddenly you see somebody with 100,000 followers who has videos with 600,000 views, and so obviously they've earned more money than if they only had their normal view. Is that amplification happening from Chinese networks of accounts? Sometimes that's hard to show, but we know they do that because there was one expose actually about Chinese diplomats' accounts on Twitter that were amplified by fake accounts to make them look more popular than they were. Going back again to these two YouTubers, I've been thinking about them a lot because I know at one point they were trying to find these disgruntled Shen Yun performing arts past staff or present performers, and then a surprising number of those people that they found ended up in subsequent New York Times reporting. How common is that kind of an approach? One of the things that the Chinese government does, or the way these campaigns unfold, and I think especially you do see it in Taiwan especially, is where content jumps from social media into the mainstream media. Sometimes it can be because there's some deliberate tie there, but a lot of times it's unintentional. You have this unintentional amplification, and sometimes you have unintentional amplification by other social media influencers. There were some examples in the US in the aftermath of 2020. There was one study that the Cardiff University did that found that these PRC-linked accounts were posting things and actually in some cases alleging election, like fake ballot burning and things like that, and other situations, other content and information. They actually got retweeted by real people, and they got spread and got a million views. In the Freedom House study, actually found examples of this type of thing happening in 13 out of the 30 countries, in Spanish, in other languages, where you have somebody who's a real influencer, and they see content, and they amplify it, not knowing that this is actually from a fake persona, and that's how it actually gets liked. When you actually read the tech reports about these fake accounts, usually the real fake accounts don't really get much of a follow-up, but all it takes is like one tweet to get amplified by someone with 800,000 followers, and suddenly it's gone a lot more mainstream. I think sometimes then that may be now there's some kind of echo chamber happening a little bit on social media. Now there's this phenomenon, right? Then now maybe you have mainstream media being like, oh, what's going on here? Well, now let me report on that. Often one of the things that might happen is that it's taking advantage of our own political polarization or existing vulnerabilities. You actually have a new sub stack that I'm going to be a very dedicated reader of because I love your work. Just tell me about that. It's called Underreported China. The idea is to really look at some of these issues, whether it's the persecution of certain minorities, political prisoners that nobody's talking about, or using all of these different ways and sources to see how the Chinese Communist Party is trying to influence media and information outside of China, and just try to uncover it and give people a chance to understand it better, both work that I'm doing myself, but really trying to amplify some of the really good work that's being done by, like I said, some of these individuals around the world who are looking at this, but the voices sometimes get buried, so wanting to give them a bit more of a boost. Well, Sarah Cooke, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. It was nice to have this conversation, and nice to see you again. Thank you all for joining Sarah Cooke and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.