American Thought Leaders - From Deep Fakes to Impersonation Networks, Inside China’s Aggressive Campaigns to Manipulate You: Sarah Cook

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

From fake online personas to manipulated audio and deep fakes to artificial amplification networks, the Chinese Communist Party is becoming more creative about how they manipulate Americans, Canadians, Taiwanese, and other targets online.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.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 Janja Kelley.

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 media, in the whole sphere of media. And something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the advent of generative AI. I was just playing with the new Grok features that's absolutely astonishing and this is something that's been used in by the Chinese regime more recently in a number of quite notable cases these

deepfakes. So why don't you jump in and just tell me about that. So the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to influence the media really 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. So just to give you a few examples that we've seen, look, Taiwan is always like the number one target for the Chinese Communist Party. And they had elections in January and there's a whole slew of examples.

But 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 that fact-check actually debunked it but it was basically a video of a U.S. 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 deepfake videos, videos that looked 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. So there you have a situation where again it's videos that are actually of real people. They're things people have actually said but they've been manipulated. And that seems to be a much more effective thing to try to be doing compared to just using like AI avatars.

Those are a little easier to spot. 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 encouragements 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, you see they have been deployed, you know, with regards to elected officials in a variety of different countries. And like you said, this is just one piece, but a very, I guess, 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 done. But this is just one of a

huge, let's call it a toolkit of methods that the regime uses. And this is, again, this is kind of your bread and butter. I want to kind of give people a whole picture of how all this works. Sure. So 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, what we would call disinformation campaigns, right?

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 spirit sphere outside one is propaganda and i think that we think of you know 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. Again, that's actually really all over the world. We counted 130 outlets in 30 countries where they were doing that type of stuff. That's one set. Then you have this element of the disinformation.

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 like 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 leverage, whether it's economic or bullying or violence or cyber attacks, to try to suppress content they don't like. 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 uses 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, make disparage the enemies, make China look good and I I think increasingly, especially when we look at the sliver of the disinformation campaigns, to actively sow confusion and discord in foreign democracies. And in some cases, this can be just content that someone put up that just this machine, so to speak, just amplifies. And some of it might even be true, just incredibly polarizing. And that's probably the hardest to deal with. Yes. I think especially when it's not clear that necessarily there are these networks of

inauthentic accounts. So I think some of these get caught and taken down. And that's how I know about them because you have cybersecurity firms, you have NGOs, you have think tanks, you have tech companies putting out reports where, oh, we closed this number of accounts, and these are the patterns that we saw. So I think sometimes just by that behavior, you can detect that this is happening. Of course, to a user, you can't. So sometimes the damage has been done by the time the stuff gets taken down. And that's one of the risks as well. I want to mention this briefly. It's not really the focus of the interview, but there is an increased concern about censorship in Western democracies.

It's a very difficult problem to deal with because, of course, you want to maximize the opportunity for people to communicate with each other, yet you have these powerful entities actually being very effective at sowing mass discord and false information, and in some cases, influencing elections and so forth. Like I said, I think you see that the Kremlin has been really active in this for a lot longer, but I think it sometimes underappreciated the resources and growing sophistication that the Chinese government is putting into this. And to date, look, they haven't done a massive, let's try to change the outcome of the U.S. elections, right?

Partly, I think, because there's actually quite a rare bipartisan consensus that the Chinese Communist Party is actually a problem and that we need to have strong policies when it comes to human rights or trade or accountability or Hong Kong or things like that. See a lot of activity on Capitol Hill on these issues that's bipartisan. I think that actually helps the American resilience. But I think you also see these examples like I gave in Taiwan, there's a whole slew of them or in the Philippines where maybe some of those inhibitions aren't there and where

the CCP is a little bit less worried about it backfiring for them politically. And so they're just like, well, if there's the political will to use these tactics to try to influence the outcome of an election, they can and they will. And when you look at what's happening globally, that really gives you a sense of some of the scenarios that could potentially happen in the U.S. at the presidential level, at the legislative level might be more likely that we've seen more examples of that in places like in Europe or in Canada, as well as in Taiwan, the targeting of MPs or MEPs who are, again, it's often party agnostic, I would say.

It's more about what that particular person's position is vis-a-vis the Chinese government, how vocal they've been on human rights. So I think that's where you start to see where these tactics could potentially be applied in a US context. So Sarah, one of the things I'm aware of is, it's kind of shocking, in some cases so stark, is these sort of fake impersonations of apparent US voters.

Can you tell me about that? Sure, so that is one phenomenon that's actually become more frequent and something that from the takedown reports or analysis reports from, say, 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 just to give a few examples, so 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, right?

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. So, of course, that makes it look more real. So one example in one of the recent reports was about accounts impersonating U.S. military families. And then one of these accounts actually started a petition about U.S. policy towards Taiwan and trying to have less US support for Taiwan. And it got 300 signatures, right?

So these are trying to impersonate real people and Americans. And you can see, so you've got the petitions got a Taiwan link, 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. One of the other things that's been documented pretty recently is that these persona accounts are starting to do polls.

Well, they'll basically try to post questions. What do you think about this or that? And basically try to get answers from real American voters. And I think the concern and suspicion is that this is basically like a kind of informal public opinion, infant intelligence gathering operation. And then those replies can then be used in future information operations as we get up maybe closer to the election to decide what content or which personas are more believable or things like that. So there's this constant evolution and learning process that's happening on the part of the PRC intelligence agencies or propaganda agencies or whoever's behind this.

Let's go to Taiwan for a second. The reason I want to talk about that is that is sort of a microcosm. You mentioned at the beginning a little bit of one very outrageous method they use, but this whole toolkit in a sense is being applied there. You can get a sense of what the capability would be anywhere. Yeah, absolutely. It was actually elections in Taiwan in 2018, which was the first time that the world took notice of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was starting to get into this Kremlin-esque disinformation game of trying to influence you know, influence elections using these using content farms and using fake accounts and using all kinds of false information. And then with every subsequent election in Taiwan in 2020 and then now they had a general election in January in 2024, you see this

evolution of the toolkit. One is this element of the use of generative AI. The other, and I think this can be even more manipulative and insidious, is actually fake audio. Because then you don't even have some of the context clues you might have with a video. So I think one of the most disconcerting examples we saw in Taiwan when it came to the use of manipulated audio was actually on election day.

And there was a prominent tycoon, at some point he had run for office, but at that point had not yet necessarily endorsed either candidate. And on election day, an audiophile pretending to be him comes out and claiming that he's now endorsed the Beijing friendly candidate. And there were a series of other efforts, one claiming that the candidate who actually ended up winning the election had a mistress and illegitimate children. And this was posted and there were like some fake DNA reports and things like that. AI avatars being news anchors to report this. And so what you see is like one piece of this campaign was this like digital e-book about

the former president Tsai Ing-wen, her secret history. And it was filled with all kinds of falsehoods and various allegations and things like that, blasted out like two weeks, in the couple of weeks before the election across multiple platforms. And that's what we mean when we talk about coordination, right? And in some cases this content is, again, also sent to like real journalists. So that then, you know, all it takes is one real journalist to be convinced or duped or whatever you want to say,

and amplify it, and it starts to get into the ordinary media ecosystem. In Taiwan, there was also an example where they actually, prosecutors arrested an online journalist for posting fake poll results. They actually found connections to Chinese government officials in Fujian province. And he was posting these poll results claiming that now the Beijing-friendly candidate was leading in the polls. Part of it is this effort to make candidates preferred by Beijing

seem more popular than they actually are. At the same time, trying to insert in the media ecosystem information that will create scandals and make candidates that Beijing doesn't like. People question their integrity, trying to discredit one side and then try to build the perceived popularity of the other side. One of the things about Taiwan, I'll just finish up with Taiwan, is it's a relatively new democratic state. And they're very kind of proud of their democratic process. And I guess very serious about making sure it's not influenced. And I think that might be part of the reason for the quick reactions, that people are skeptical.

People realize that they're in the crosshairs of Beijing largely. It's just something that's sort of in the consciousness. Of course, Beijing helps with a lot of the overflights and maritime encroachments and everything else. But 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 before in the past as well. And so, you know, exactly this toolkit is used across the board. And I know this is something you've written about and talked about. So give me a picture of what that looks like. Sure. So I think, you know, when we look at these disinformation campaigns, I would say there are like three main targets that the Chinese government has. You have this subset where it is related to elected officials. That'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. And then the third is where they're targeting who they perceive to be the CCP enemies, right? So for example, you know, some of the recent take, you know, over the last few years you had actually an American YouTuber who went to China. This was at the height of the not only allegations but documentation about massive detentions of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and just like families disappearing, people just like

in such huge numbers and the Chinese government trying to fend off these these accusations so then you have this American youtuber go to China and go to Urumqi and talk to these Uighurs and they show how happy they are and so on and so forth and so forth. And later it turns out that trip was actually paid for by Chinese state media. So that's like just one example. There are other of these kind of more coordinated, manipulated campaigns. You would have videos of Uighurs talking like they're, oh, we're happy and everything's fine and we don't know what this is or things like that. And again, being promoted and amplified and posted in these ways that are extremely suspicious.

It's not the features of organic people posting. Not to mention, YouTube is blocked in China. Some of the Uyghurs who have been placed in detention were there because they used a VPN to get on global social media platforms. All of a sudden, all of these Uyghurs are allowed to get on YouTube and talk about how lovely things are and how nice life is. It gets very, very suspicious very quickly. So that's one example.

I think then you see with regards to Tibetans also and Hong Kongers, that that being a community that's also been targeted by, you know, 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 just like earlier, I think it was Meta earlier this year, Meta or Microsoft, I think it was Meta, you know, 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.

And so that's, again, this element of trying to discredit these enemies of the CCP. And then 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. And so 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, you know, mixture of false and maybe true. We don't know. It's hard to know.

Defaming Falun Gong and also the Shen Yun Performing Arts Company. Then you've got examples of like account impersonations on X. And we can talk more in general about this tactic of impersonation because it's used pretty widely also by the CCP so that starts to get very suspicious so now you're saying two things oh there's something more like bigger this isn't just like one or two people spouting things off now we've got these account impersonations and 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 like 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 and in terms of like to push more negative, I think they use the word defamatory actually, like information about Falun Gong to search results globally, this is worldwide. So that's where you start to see these like multi-layer campaigns in some case, again, targeting these communities outside of China. I mean, 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 really 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. So basically the CCP using these tactics to discredit their enemies. And it's very interesting, these leaked reports,

we see them popping up from time to time, but how common is that? Because it seems like these are things that the regime would never wanna see the light of the day. Well, I think it's interesting when you talk about and you look at the things that the regime would never want to see the light of the day. Well, I think it's interesting when you talk about and you look at the materials, the internal materials of the CCP. Because sometimes they actually posted themselves on the internet. And one of the things that's been a real goldmine for me in my research is going through local Chinese government websites and seeing how they're talking at the local level about how they're going after these minorities

and how they're going after Chinese activists and what they're going to be doing in terms of trying to offer rewards for people to be turned in. When you get to the local level, often when they're at that implementation level, they can be remarkably candid, if you can read between the lines,

about the degree of repression that they're using I think when you talk look at these foreign facing campaigns in some of these leaks that usually is coming from some type of internal source that is sympathetic to the outside world or a sympathetic to either a particular community or Concern and therefore has shared it. So for example, about in December, ahead of the Taiwanese election, there was I think a Reuters report about a memo that was leaked of a meeting basically coordinating their action and being very explicit from the notes in this memo

that somehow reached the Taiwanese government and then they publicized it about how they're going to try to influence the Taiwanese election. There were two things in particular. One was trying to influence media and social. There were two things in particular. One was trying to influence media and social media through these kinds of coordinated attacks. The other was trying to encourage people based in China

who are from Taiwan originally and tend to be friendlier to China to go back to Taiwan to vote and actually offering cheap flights and things like that to facilitate them going back to vote. And then this set of documents that were in this latest report were basically very similar in the sense that they report that they don't publish the whole documents. These are notes from internal meetings. So of a similar fashion of meetings of the Ministry of Public Security in different provinces

and a Chinese state-run think tank and investment agency. How prevalent? So in this FDI report, there's these two YouTubers that are specifically identified, I guess, as great tools to amplify the regime message. But how common is that type of use for social media influencers? I think this is one of those really tricky things to document. Like you know it's happening and it's really hard to document because it's actually happening off platform, right? It's like people being co-opted offline and then it manifesting an online content sometimes with someone

seemingly seeming to be an authentic person. And 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 like tips of the iceberg right so one example is the one I gave earlier about Xinjiang there was another example and this is to the credit actually of two American YouTubers who kind of followed the breadcrumbs and then given by the CCP-linked entity and then exposed it. But they were basically, an email was sent, they said, 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.

And they were like, no, this seems kind of suspicious. We're going to pretend we want to do it. So they say that they pretend, they say, okay, well pretend we want to do it. So they say that they pretend. They say, OK, well, 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 US deer population.

And so 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. I think then there was another example. So one of the things, the other places I like to dig are in the filings that are submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the US.

Right, FARA. FARA, right. That's one of the places where you can actually find the money trail. First of all, there's a bunch of PR firms doing all kinds of stuff and trying to influence US media on behalf of various entities, united front entities with various ties to the Chinese government. But one of these campaigns was actually a PR firm with a contract to the New York Consulate

to do a campaign promoting the Beijing Winter Olympics through social media influencers. I think it was Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok. So that's an example where that may be the content maybe isn't as disinformation-y, that's a word I say, claiming that, trying to claim that COVID originated in the U.S. deer population. But it is an example of like you have some kind of money flow through multiple different layers of proxies. So that if somebody's watching an ordinary TikTok influencer, someone maybe they follow who does other things. That's where it's more suspicious and it's much more insidious because it's more manipulative

because it's not like these situations where they just create this fake persona and this fake account that comes out of nowhere and suddenly starts doing this stuff. This is someone who actually has some kind of following. Now one of the things, even when there isn't necessarily a direct monetary or funding, well the PRC has got a whole lot of fake accounts, right? And YouTube is often, and some of these websites are based on monetization. So 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.

And suddenly you see somebody with 100,000 followers who has videos with like 600,000 views. And so obviously they've earned more money if they only had like their normal view part, right? And some of, 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 actually were. Well, and just going back again to these two YouTubers, I've been thinking about them a lot because I know they were basically, you know, at one point they were trying to find these

disgruntled Shen Yun performing arts, you know, past staff or present performers and this kind of thing. And then, you know, 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. And sometimes, again, sometimes it can be because there's some deliberate tie there, but a lot of times it's unintentional. So you have this unintentional amplification. And sometimes you have unintentional amplification, you know, by other social media influencers.

So there were some examples in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 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, you know, like ballot burning and things like that and other situations, other content and information. And they actually got retweeted by real people and they got spread, you know, and got a million views. And in the Freedom House study actually found examples of this type of thing happening in 13 out of the 30 countries. In Spanish and other languages where you have somebody who is 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 like because when you actually read the tech reports about these fake accounts usually the real fake accounts

don't really get much of a following 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. And I think sometimes then that maybe now there's some kind of echo chamber happening a little bit on social media, now there's this phenomenon right and so then now maybe you have mainstream media being like oh what's going on here well now let me report on that. And often one of the things that might happen is is that again it's this taking advantage often of our own political polarization or kind of existing vulnerabilities. You know, we could talk for hours about platform manipulation. I've had numerous guests on the show about TikTok. It's something I think is incredibly important and underappreciated in America.

I'll direct our viewers to some of those episodes. We're going to include them in the description. We know TikTok is a significant route of Chinese Communist Party influence. Where else is that found at the platform level? And WeChat, but a lot of people don't even know what WeChat is. Let me talk a little bit about WeChat because I think that is a real vulnerability. And I think it also can show, like we've talked about how what they do in Taiwan is what they could do here.

What's happening on WeChat, you know, can be well, this is what could happen on a platform like TikTok, for instance. So WeChat is owned by the Chinese company Tencent. It actually has like Communist Party cells in China and so forth. And in China, it's very heavily censored and monitored. And it's ubiquitous because in China, you need it not only to be able to communicate with anybody like your Rolodex and things like that, but to pay for things, to order things. Like it's just like ubiquitous and used in multiple levels of your life. So if you get your WeChat account closed in China, your life is very limiting.

Now, that platform is also widely available around the world. And the difference between even the split that TikTok, that ByteDance does with TikTok outside China versus Douyin inside China, doesn't really exist with WeChat. It's the same platform. There are some differences about accounts but actually if you really want to have account to reach a large number of people you actually need to have like either a national ID or a business registered in China. So what happens then is it's actually widely used by a lot of Chinese speakers in countries like Australia, the United States and Canada. Canada I was gonna say because that's where it's been used.

Yeah, absolutely. And so now you've got this Chinese company that's not even pretended to be separate from the CCP in a way that TikTok is kind of trying to say that it is, or it's got some separation. Basically deciding who can talk to who, who can talk to American Chinese-speaking voters, what content gets shared, what gets maybe potentially amplified, what Chinese Americans can say to other Chinese Americans and potential voters. And there are lots of examples of and complaints. There's actually a lawsuit in California by a bunch of Chinese Americans saying that they were censored

on WeChat because they posted something about the Hong Kong protests in 2019 and their account got shut down and it ruined their business in Southern California because so many of their clientele were Chinese you know Americans or people you know Chinese speaking residents and that's how they would make you know make appointments and things like that and they would use it to promote their business when you get to like elections that's where we've seen like in Canada for instance some of these campaigns that have tried to target specific members of parliament and the irony perhaps here or maybe not

as I counted four specific MPs who are targeted three of them are actually of Asian descent like one of the ones that there was actually a smear campaign about him on WeChat, he's part Hong Kong. And the Chinese government didn't like, the consulate didn't like what he was saying about Hong Kong and they thought he would be too critical and introduce policies and support,

maybe also allowing more of the refugees that are coming out of Hong Kong now after the political deterioration there. So there was actually a campaign to smear his reputation using the WeChat app. And then the other thing that happens is that again, this offline manipulation where the Chinese consulate basically puts pressure on local Chinese community organizations not to invite candidates to speak to their own constituents or to try to pressure people not to volunteer for some campaigns or even in some to pressure people not to volunteer for some campaigns

or even in some cases maybe not to vote for them. So you end up with these candidates who are actually trying to authentically represent the Asian Canadian community basically being cut off and shut out because of the Chinese Communist Party's broader influence in some of the community organizations as well as this media stronghold they have on WeChat. And in the United States, and you also have a situation where on television, China Central Television in Chinese is broadcast all over the United States. Beijing really wanted

to influence Chinese-speaking voters in America. They don't even have to go through WeChat or YouTubers. They could just broadcast it directly into the various people who are watching CCTV. That's right. And I happen to know that it's not just in Chinese language that those channels are fully penetrated across the US cable systems, but also they're like CGTN Español and these kinds of the English language propaganda

and Spanish language propaganda operations. But I think one of the things I did when I was looking at influence in the US was looking at the cable packages in Chinese. And if you actually know the Chinese language media landscape, it's either CCTV, a Taiwanese outlet that's known to be more friendly to China, Phoenix TV, which is based in Hong Kong and the owner had ties to the PLA, but then was actually bought out by a Chinese state entity. And some other Hong Kong channels that, again, if you know the media landscape in Hong Kong, especially now, it's like some of the remaining channels. And that's like the cable package you can usually get in most parts of the United States.

So again, it's not even, there's just multiple layers sometimes of influence and that's again, I think that's really a disservice. A disservice to Chinese speaking Americans that they don't have access to, you know, they have to go online. When you look online, there's like obviously a lot more opportunities for information. But if they're just living in a world where they're watching television news or they're reading WeChat, which is actually the media consumption habits of a lot of Chinese Americans, it can be a very distorted view, not only of what's happening in China, but of the country of America where they're actually living.

Or they live in the cities where NTD TV has Carriage, as they painstakingly managed to get Carriage, our sister TV network in Chinese. I mean, everything you're describing is deeply disquieting and obviously having an effect, right? There's one piece that's in some ways harder to characterize. And this is just, it's very hard to be a journalist

in China today, right? I mean, there's this kind of reciprocity type back and forth. In the last administration, they've gotten a few people back in. But basically, you have to agree to some pretty stringent written and unwritten rules to be able to report there. And just in general, as a media organization, you have some restrictions. I want you to paint me a picture of how journalists how the regime essentially forces journalists to behave if they're going to work there yeah so here's one of that is like one of when we talk about this question of like censorship right and pressures um the the pressures facing and the restrictions on foreign correspondents is like a key tactic, right? And it goes into multiple levels.

One is sometimes it's just that, you know, a lot of foreign media outlets are blocked. Their websites are blocked in China, right? So then even if they're producing content in Chinese, they've basically been cut out of the market. And it's kind of surprising that entities like the U.S. government haven't made more of a deal. A big deal about this is a trade issue because they're basically being cut out of the market. But the Chinese government really doesn't want people reading, you know, independent media outlets coverage of China. But then when it comes to the correspondence, you've got restrictions on visas, but it's more than that. It's like even when somebody's there, if they go to try to cover something in a certain part of the country, they can

get beaten up. What really I think even constrains them more and what's increased is the pressure on their own sources. So then the Chinese government, they'll get permission to try to speak to somebody, but it's just become increasingly dangerous for Chinese people to speak to foreign journalists. And then one newer phenomenon that the Foreign Correspondent Club of China talks about is that people after the fact starting to suddenly say, try to file lawsuits in China against China correspondents saying that you quoted me without permission or things like that. And then the other thing is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs basically controls anybody who can help the journalist. So if you're going on a reporting trip out of Beijing

or Shanghai, they're basically controlling who can be your driver, who can help the journalist. So if you're going on a reporting trip out of Beijing or Shanghai, they're basically controlling who can be your driver, who can be your translator if you need a translator, who can be your, you know, who can be your guide, who can be any of that, right? Who cleans offices? They have to register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So first of all that creates all kinds of levels of even non-digital surveillance, let alone the level of digital surveillance that foreign correspondents face. But again, this level of danger, because you're trying to report like a story and really expose something that the CCP doesn't want. You're potentially putting multiple different Chinese people in danger.

And the Chinese government knows that that's going to cause reconsiderations for media outlets and foreign correspondents. They've also made it the number of foreign correspondents not only from the United States has dropped. So actually India used to have like four or five correspondents and there was one fellow there that I used to know and did some really good reporting. He was actually the one that would be able to ask the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs about a Freedom House report when it came out because the Chinese Ministry would actually ask him and then he would get a great quote from

the Chinese ministry you know saying that what we're saying is all lies which of course means that it's all true right all four of the correspondence were kicked out European correspondence a lot of African media they can't actually have correspondence in China but the a they can't afford it because it's incredibly expensive because just to go through the visa process can take a year. And so you've got someone in staff who can't actually go and do their job and do the reporting. So there's just so many layers. So I think that's really underestimated how much the control over who can report inside China, what they can report, and how. Well, and I want to flip it around too. Specifically, I'm interested in this question

of how that reality that you're describing there also may impact how, for example, some of these media will report on Chinese in America or basically stuff that isn't focused on China specifically, but some of the dissident groups, it seems like they would gain a lot of leverage if the media only has one or two or a handful of foreign correspondents there under this tight situation. Yes, I would say that's only one of many leverage points that can be used and have been used in some cases to put pressure on media around the world to either suppress certain coverage or amplify certain coverage. Another issue is you know when you have these big media conglomerates that have other content especially sports or entertainment content that they're

trying to get into China and then that becomes at risk based on their reporting. So if you remember the case of the Houston Rockets manager tweeting about Hong Kong protests, ESPN faced a lot of backlash in terms of their broadcasts into China. And then there was, again, a leaked memo from an editor that came out about him telling the people reporting on certain certain within ESPN at the time that they need to be careful how they cover the Hong Kong protests that's not even talking about like the NBA's interest and things like that that's like a media but I think when you get into like these broader issues of sources of income of again also like China Daily giving

money to outlets in order to print inserts like like that can amount to millions of dollars. In some cases, they're giving money just to print the paper issues, right? That can also amount to millions of dollars. So you've got all kinds of different points of leverage. So one of the phenomena is the Chinese government offering free trips to China. And sometimes it's actually whole scholarships, right? And I think in the global south, and for good reason, that becomes a very attractive prospect. People can learn Chinese. And it's, again, this mixing of people go on these junkets or on these programs. It'll be a combination of real skills that they're taught with the propaganda element,

where there's lectures on the Marxist approach to journalism. Or there's just tours and talking about how, one of the key talking points, how China's a democracy. We have a parliament. Did you know that? And journalists who don't know, especially from maybe Latin America, from Africa, or even others, would maybe potentially come back and be like, well, China's actually a democracy. I didn't realize how open and democratic it actually is.

And so some of it ends up being traditional media and some of it ends up being social media influencers. I think what happens in the West is that there are actually these offers. Huawei does it too. This was actually Josh Rogan I think from the Washington Post mentioned this, that he got an email from Huawei offering for like a junket to go to China. Now, one of the things happens is that people actually who know China usually will not go. They realize there's something kind of fishy going on. But then what will happen is the regime will start to target not the China correspondents.

It starts to be other media executives. It starts to be people who are reporting on other issues that are not China specialists. And of course, then those people may be more vulnerable to going and basically, you know, being convinced that maybe a less sophisticated interpretation. So that's one of the things. So you've got the influence that happens at the like media level, at the owner level, at the like financial business level. And then you've got sometimes the targeting of and co-opt, you know, co-optation in some capacity of journalists themselves.

And I think that's where you also can get a mixed bag within a particular media outlet, where on the one hand you might have some really competent China correspondents and some really good reporting, but then you've got stuff that somebody writes, and you're like, oh my gosh, this is a total fluff piece for the Chinese government. And it can often be maybe some of the people and the reporters who aren't necessarily actually China experts, but have been offered one of these chances to go to China. So one thing that jumps to my mind is a New York Times op-ed that I saw by Regina Ip,

a top, very pro-Beijing official in Hong Kong, writing about the national security law and effectively how great it is for Hong Kong. What do you make of stuff like that? Actually, this element of getting op-eds placed by Chinese officials or various proxies is pretty common. In the U.S., for a while, going through the FARA filings, there were actually PR companies who had contracts with like the Chinese embassy and consulate to get op-eds by Chinese officials placed in mainstream US media. But it's a global phenomenon. In Nigeria there is actually like a column that a local newspaper had that would just be the commentary of the Chinese

consulate. And so I think there really comes this question of you know these decisions of how who gets to put op-eds and who gets to get placed. If you have an op-ed by a Chinese official, should there be an opposing viewpoint offered by a critique? What kind of fact checking should they go through? In some cases we have, including in the US, there'll be interviews with Chinese officials that are like transcripted interviews and theyed interviews, and they'll publish those,

and sometimes it's come out that they didn't allow those to be edited, or the answers to be edited, or maybe it was that the Chinese government actually decided what questions it was going to ask. It was like very different from how these types of interviews would be, in a way that basically gave additional credibility to what the Chinese official was saying and a little bit of the stamp of approval of the outlet because they wanted to be able to be the ones that got the interview with the Chinese official. And one of the things I did for some of the research is that that I actually watched some interviews that the Chinese ambassador to US, multiple different ambassadors had with major US media. They would be on live TV, on CNN, on NPR, on Meet the Press.

And now on the one hand, the journalists were often trying to, you know, be pretty blunt and challenge the ambassador. But these are really slick guys. And so they would just pivot. And so essentially, you're still, when you're making these kinds of decisions, giving an audience to, of millions and millions of American news consumers, you know, to a Chinese ambassador at the time talking about COVID, talking about things that we know that they're spreading falsehoods about. I think then sometimes you get into this question of like op-eds that are sometimes written by these other proxies where it's not revealed.

So there was a case in Romania of someone writing about Huawei and it turned out saying, oh, we don't have to worry about security issues related to Huawei and 5G. Turns out it was actually being paid by Huawei. There were cases in the U.S., again, going through FARA filings or other filings of commentators in the United States or like a think tank, basically getting funding through multiple other proxies with ties to the United Front and Hong Kong officials and writing op-eds in local US media basically, you know trying to say oh we should have more engagement with China, we should have more investment, we should have more trade, you know in the heartland and stuff like that. So I think that's where it gets really murky and in terms of newspapers for example having clearer guidelines of

transparency or identification, whether it's for the inserts that the Chinese government is putting in local media or in these situations where you're having op-eds that you're running by people who are clearly representing the Chinese regime and at least having some kind of proper fact-checking and rigor that you would put on anybody else that you're publishing on your pages. One of the things that the Chinese Communist Party is incredibly sensitive about is media coverage of the human rights situation in China. It doesn't like to be challenged at all. Tell me a little bit about how that's actually played out in media over the last

couple of decades. It really is to the credit of I think, of independent media around the world of trying to cover issues and uncover the things that the Chinese Communist Party often once hid in. I mean, a lot of what we know about what's happened in Xinjiang and how the Uyghurs are being persecuted or what's happened in Tibet or what's happened to human rights lawyers or even what was happening in Hong Kong, what's been happening to prisoners, is thanks to media coverage, you know, from, in some cases it's Western media,

in some cases it's Chinese language media, in some cases it's citizen journalists who are really taking a lot of risk to get information out. Now look, these challenges and all the different layers, like there are still gaps, right? And it's become harder and harder. First of all, for television journalists, it's especially hard in China because China really doesn't want that footage of the like you know police beating down the like protesters who are

you know the elderly protesters who are complaining about their pensions right let alone if they're trying to interview someone that's in a much even more threatened you know it's so dangerous they can't interview a Uyghur inside China or Falun Gong practitioner. So I think that becomes a gap. I think another one is like the actual finances of Chinese leaders where there have been a few bits of, and that's not so human right, but it's still really important and what the CCP doesn't want covered. You know, there have been some really good investigative pieces about that.

But we also know that there was censorship from the top, especially at Bloomberg, to stop some of that type of reporting. And then I think you do have cases like the Falun Gong human rights crisis in China that does still remain actually a major gap, and that it would be nice to see more of some of the strategies and sources that have been used to uncover what's happening in Xinjiang, to highlight what's going on in Tibet, to show what's happening at the grassroots level in terms of like the white paper protests and things like that, and to use that on some of these other issues like the persecution of Falun Gong or even the persecution of Christians that I think you don't see as much about, but does actually influence a lot of Chinese people

throughout China, so not just in the outskirts in the different regions, and then has many, many more implications about Chinese governance. Because if you're talking about Han Chinese being arbitrarily detained or tortured or tortured to death, it's still different if it's happening in Xinjiang, which is still a minority area, and it's still horrific and tragic for those families. But if you're talking about the broader rule of law implications, if it's happening in Fujian or in Liaoning or in Guangzhou, that's different.

It has many more ramifications if you're trying to understand what's really happening in some of the very parts of China that like foreign business people and diplomats have more of a chance to travel to. And so I think more abuse, more coverage of some of those types of abuses happening there and really thinking about what does that mean for us to understand today's China. I think those are some of the gaps that would be great to see filled using maybe more diverse sources or some different kind of ingenuity because it is really important to understand what's really happening in today's China and the implications not only for China but for the United States or for the rest of the world. As I'm faced with the whole picture you've painted here, this is daunting. This is a massive operation. I know the United Front dedicates more than $10 billion annually to these types of influence operations. It's just astonishing. As we finish up, how to start trying to deal with this?

I was saying, in Taiwan, maybe we have some thoughts. We may be extremely skeptical. I think that's a big part of it. Well, look, I think one of the things that was the optimistic part of my research over the last 10 years on this issue is there is some real resilience. We also shouldn't overestimate the CCP's capacity or underestimate what even small things can do. One of the things we found was that actually of the 30 countries we looked at, at least

half of them, we found them to be resilient in the face of all of this. And Taiwan and the United States had very high levels of resilience. But, you know, it goes down to like all you need in some cases is actually some reporting about how the CCP is influencing. And that can actually have a really big impact in terms of raising awareness, like exposing these disinformation campaigns. And it was like like in Italy, it was like this one journalist who like did two articles, one where he found a fake Twitter campaign where it was making it sound like Italians were saying thank you to China for COVID aid in like much larger numbers than they actually were. Another where he looked at like content analysis of the public broadcaster that has some of these deals, content deals with Chinese state media and how they were reporting about China. And it was very imbalanced.

Huge impact. Huge impact, huge impact. I think those are the types of things where sometimes all it takes is like, even sometimes like literally one or two people in the country or a group of like NGOs and some of this really systematic data analysis and investigations that you do see the civil society in places like Taiwan doing that just makes people more aware of the tactics, gives the government and tech companies leverage and information about what they can do, and just warns the public like this is an actual thing and this could be happening. And again, it's not even just limited to places like Taiwan or the West. You have some trainings for journalists in Africa. You have some new think

tanks coming up. You have projects in places like Poland or Romania and things like that. Like it's really actually quite inspiring to see the level of awareness and effort in some cases that people are putting into this because they see. Not because they're talking about the big power competition between the US and China. They're worried about the encroachment over media freedom and national sovereignty and electoral integrity of their own countries. So there's a lot more work to be done. I think, you know, for ordinary users, if you see something that aligns a little bit too closely with what the Chinese Communist Party might want you to think, you might want to like, you know, just be a little bit, you know, skeptical. You know, I would encourage people to actually keep an eye out for some of these kinds of reports.

Right. Because, again, sometimes it's a little bit more obvious, maybe if it's a clear Chinese Communist Party target. But if it's someone who's like a fake account, persona accounts impersonating other American voters, like that's much harder to detect. But that is one of the things that they also do. So I think the more, you know, I think one of some of the areas of democratic resilience that we have is try to reduce the political polarization, keep some of these issue areas bipartisan, invest in domestic entities that can do these investigations and exposés, and I think really also support our Chinese diaspora and being able to have access to better and more and more information about not only China,

but what's happening in America. And Sarah, now that as we actually finish up, you actually have a new sub stack that you're gonna be writing that I'm gonna be a very dedicated reader of because I love your work. Just tell me about that. So it's called Underreported China.

And basically the idea is to really look at some of these issues, some of these things 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 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 Cook, 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 Cook and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.