China, Iran and Russia are using the coronavirus crisis to launch a propaganda and disinformation onslaught against the United States, the State Department warns in a new report.
The three governments are pushing a host of matching messages: that the novel coronavirus was an American bioweapon, that the U.S. was scoring political points off the crisis, that the virus didn’t come from China, that U.S. troops spread it, that America’s sanctions are killing Iranians, that China’s response was great while the U.S.’s was negligent, that all three governments are managing the crisis well, and that the U.S. economy can't bear the toll of the virus.
“What we saw as the health crisis started to come under control in China is that the CCP really started pushing a concerted effort to try to re-shape that narrative,” she said, using the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party. “So in a short period of time the CCP went from letting Russian disinformation claiming the U.S. was the source of the virus proliferate in Chinese social media, to raising questions on state media about the origin’s source, to promoting disinformation that the U.S. was the source of the virus.”
The Chinese government’s messaging is both defensive and offensive, she said.
“At the same time, we saw Beijing unleashing a steady drumbeat of pro-PRC content across its global media networks and also from its overseas missions and that included increasingly vocal criticism of how democratic countries were responding to the crisis,” she said.
Of particular interest: dueling messages about whether the U.S. or China is a better ally.
“There’s a big increase in attention recently in Arabic language to Western foreign aid, interestingly, where there had been hardly any attention focused on that at all,” he said. “It sticks out like a sore thumb.”
And since the pandemic’s start, Meyer said the firm has seen heightened interest from Hindi and Persian-language internet users in websites that denigrate Western medicine and tout alternatives, including energy therapies and questionable supplements.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...artment-193107