China has stepped up its propaganda and disinformation war with the US in the latest escalation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s cyber war on the West. Microsoft reports a marked rise in CCP-affiliated covert influence operations that engage with target US audiences on social media.
In a new report, “Sophistication, scope, and scale: Digital threats from East Asia increase in breadth and effectiveness,” Microsoft reveals that since March of this year, the CCP has been employing the latest artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically create disturbingly powerful propaganda images that are already drawing escalating levels of engagement from authentic social media users.
“These images bear the hallmarks of diffusion-powered image generation and are more eye-catching than awkward visual content in previous campaigns. Users have more frequently reposted these visuals, despite common indicators of AI generation—for example, more than five fingers on a person’s hand,” says Microsoft.
Microsoft also says that, together with other IT industry partners, it observed CCP-affiliated social media accounts impersonating US voters across the political spectrum ahead of the 2022 US midterm elections. The agents operating the fictitious accounts posed as American citizens and responded to comments from genuine users.
“These more sophisticated accounts are operated by real people”
“Unlike earlier IO campaigns from CCP-affiliated actors that used easy-to-spot computer-generated handles, display names, and profile pictures, these more sophisticated accounts are operated by real people who employ fictitious or stolen identities to conceal the accounts’ affiliation with the CCP,” says Microsoft.
The report adds that both in behavior and content, these accounts display many well-documented Chinese tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), such as accounts posting in Mandarin in their early stages before switching to another language or engaging with content from other China-aligned assets.
Microsoft has named an elite group of hackers within China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), the 912 Special Group, the likely culprits. According to the US Department of Justice, the group operated a social media troll farm that created thousands of fake online personas and pushed CCP propaganda targeting pro-democracy activists. The cyber-propaganda currently being conducted against the US is part of a global campaign run by the CCP.
China’s state-affiliated multilingual social media influencer initiative has successfully engaged target audiences in at least 40 languages and grown its global audience to over 103 million. Currently, however, China’s main target in its cyber wars is not the US but Taiwan, where the CCP has long-held ambitions to unite the territory with the mainland. But both countries can look forward to being China’s prime cyber targets in the months ahead.
“Taiwan and the United States are likely to remain the top two priorities for Chinese IO [information operations], particularly with upcoming elections in both countries in 2024,” predicts the report.
