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April 23, 2020 01:00 pm

Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic In US: Officials

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The alarming messages came fast and furious in mid-March, popping up on the cellphone screens and social media feeds of millions of Americans grappling with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Spread the word, the messages said: The Trump administration was about to lock down the entire country. "They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters," warned one of the messages, which cited a source in the Department of Homeland Security. "He said he got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the call today with his dispatch orders." The messages became so widespread over 48 hours that the White House's National Security Council issued an announcement via Twitter that they were "FAKE." Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters. The amplification techniques are alarming to officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans' cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. [...] Two American officials stressed they did not believe Chinese operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified existing ones. Those efforts enabled the messages to catch the attention of enough people that they then spread on their own, with little need for further work by foreign agents. The messages appeared to gain significant traction on Facebook as they were also proliferating through texts, according to an analysis by The New York Times. "American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake social media accounts to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who in turn unwittingly help spread them," the report adds. "American intelligence officers are also examining whether spies in China's diplomatic missions in the United States helped spread the fake lockdown messages, a senior American official said. [...] And the apparent aim of spreading the fake lockdown messages last month is consistent with a type of disinformation favored by Russian actors -- namely sowing chaos and undermining confidence among Americans in the U.S. government."

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