China’s Advancing Efforts to Influence the U.S. Election Raise Alarms

Beware, mods removed NYT reportage along similar lines as it applied to Russia when I tried to post it. Some topics are forbidden!

Russian bots and trolls are now Chinese bots and trolls. Blue Anon conspiracy theories worked so well, why not recycle them?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In an echo of Russia’s influence campaign before the 2016 election, China appears to be trying to harness partisan divisions to undermine the Biden administration’s policies, despite recent efforts by the two countries to lower the temperature in their relations.

“I’ve never seen anything along those lines at all before,” said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that uncovered a small group of the fake accounts posing as Trump supporters.

In a separate project, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization in Washington, identified 170 inauthentic pages and accounts on Facebook that have also pushed anti-American messages, including pointed attacks on Mr. Biden.

Until now, China’s efforts to advance its ideology in the West struggled to gain traction, first as it pushed its official propaganda about the superiority of its culture and economy and later as it began denigrating democracy and stoking anti-American sentiment.

In February, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a Chinese-linked account on X calling itself a Western name alongside a “MAGA 2024” reference shared a video from RT, the Russian television network controlled by the Kremlin, to claim that Mr. Biden and the Central Intelligence Agency had sent a neo-Nazi gangster to fight in Ukraine.

The accounts denounced efforts by American lawmakers to ban the popular TikTok app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, as a form of “true authoritarianism” orchestrated by Israel and as a tool for Mr. Biden to undermine China.

The original article contains 1,448 words, the summary contains 251 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

These think tank ghouls know very well what kind of reports they need to make if they want to keep being funded by western governments.

I attended a talk by a cybersecurity expert recently who spent 45 minutes talking about how China, Russia and North Korea are hacking br*tish hospitals (etc). I wish I threw my shoe at him, but he was taller and also I was at work.

The pay is shit too, eg https://isdglobal.recruitee.com/o/uk-operations-associate 25-30k in London. You can barely rent a room with that kind of pay. So I have to wonder if this stuff is personal/religious.