China Didn’t Interfere in the US Election—It Sat Back and Laughed

In the months leading up to November’s election, former President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to paint China as the biggest threat to the integrity of the vote.

But it turns out China was more interested in mocking America’s failed democracy than in bothering to try and undermine it. 

As the U.S. and much of the Western world were consumed by the political turmoil playing out in Washington in the weeks after the election, fed by Trump’s increasingly deranged conspiracy theories about stolen elections, it may have appeared a perfect opportunity for adversaries to stir up even more trouble by injecting their own disinformation into the conversation.

But in China, they took a different approach.

Rather than trying to boost conspiracies about rigged voting machines or dead people casting ballots, a Chinese social media disinformation campaign instead focused on showing the world the deteriorating state of American democracy.

“When [will] the American race nightmare [be over]?” one video asked in October. Another called America “a society of cannibals.” Another video said “the epidemic, riots, and crisis are rampant,” adding, “This is the real America!”

By November, the videos were saying the U.S. was “in a state of disarray comparable to the eve of the Civil War,” and that America’s “darkest hour had yet to arrive.”

The comments and videos were published by a network of thousands of fake social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube known as Spamoflague Dragon, the details of which were published in a report from social media analysis company Graphika on Thursday morning. 

While Graphika’s researchers have not attributed the campaign to anyone, it closely mimics Chinese state-media rhetoric and amplifies the social media accounts of Chinese officials.

The campaign has been operating for two years, initially focusing on tensions in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but until recent months it has had very little impact and failed to gain any traction outside of its own bubble of fake accounts.

While it continues to focus some resources on messaging in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the group’s primary focus today is to undermine the U.S. to audiences around the world.

“It is talking about America, not necessarily talking to America,” Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika and co-author of the report, told VICE News.

“It's holding up this image of America as fundamentally dysfunctional and even sometimes explicitly saying that the American democratic model is broken. They're overtly saying, ‘Yeah, China's rising, America's fallen.’”

Nimmo said that from mid-2020 onward there's been a rapid increase in the amount of confrontational content about the U.S. being produced by the Spamoflague Dragon campaign. It is now the biggest part of the campaign.

And the output from the Spamoflague Dragon campaign typically tracks with official Chinese statements from the state media.

For example, on Jan. 6 in the hours after the Capitol insurrection, the state-run Global Times newspaper highlighted that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had called the Hong Kong protests “a beautiful sight to behold,” claiming that there was a “double standard” in how Western leaders treated violence there, in contrast to the insurrection in Washington.

In the days after the riots, Spamoflague Dragon produced at least three videos that featured the Pelosi phrase.

The campaign also focused on former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an outspoken critic of Beijing, gleefully calling him the “worst Secretary of State in the history of the United States” — a label previously awarded by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

But sometimes the videos didn’t really work, revealing the fact this group is still relatively unsophisticated in its tactics.

“They did a video late last year on the COVID crisis in the U.S., and how, how much individual states were struggling. And to illustrate their voiceover, which is all about local authorities being overwhelmed in the United States, they used footage of [U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then they've got footage of ambulances in Madrid,” Nimmo said.

China is no stranger to spreading propaganda and disinformation, but Spamoflague Dragon is its first real attempt to use social media platforms to reach an audience outside of China.

Nimmo says that the group has had the most success in regions like Pakistan, Venezuela, and Cuba, where its message has been amplified by accounts outside its own network—something it had previously failed to achieve.

“What it has become is really a tool to be used in places where there's some kind of geopolitical competition between China and the U.S.,” Nimmo said.

But unlike Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, which mounted a hugely successful campaign to interfere in the 2016 election by creating accounts that claimed to be American, Spamoflague Dragon’s content and accounts are not trying to pretend to be someone else.

“One thing they're not trying to do at all is hide their affiliation with China,” Nimmo said. “Even if you have an English-language voiceover, you then have subtitles in Mandarin, the seed is often clearly China-associated. There's nothing like what we saw from the Russians in 2016 trying really hard to look like Americans.”

Nimmo and his team have been tracking this group from the beginning and have repeatedly forced social media companies to shut down accounts associated with it. But they continue to return, with most of the accounts appearing to be purchased from bot farms in countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, where it’s easy and cheap to buy thousands of accounts at once.

This time around, however, Nimmo and his team say the campaign is spending more resources on creating unique personas that aren’t that easy to spot, and that shift could signal a new level of sophistication for the group.

“This is not a massive viral success, but it's the first time we've seen any breakouts at all,” Nimmo said. ”The tactical shift event is interesting because it looks like they're experimenting with something other than just brute force, massive numbers of cheap fake accounts.”