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By Betsy Morris and Robert McMillan 

China has been buying up ads on U.S. social-media sites and adopting online tactics reminiscent of Russian disinformation campaigns in an apparent attempt to shape the story internationally about the coronavirus response, according to researchers analyzing the activity.

The efforts include ad purchases on Facebook Inc. promoting the English-language arms of Chinese state-media outlets, as well as posts there and on Twitter Inc.'s platform that in some cases disparage U.S. efforts to fight the global pandemic, the researchers say.

From mid-February until early March, social-media sites linked to Chinese state media posted more than 3,300 times a day, triple the normal rate, according to Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass.-based cybersecurity consulting firm. Those outlets were principally active on Facebook and Twitter, the research showed.

The Chinese tweets, researchers say, evoke Russia's tactics, which involved spreading messages that can incite doubt and stir anger about basic facts and sometimes promote fictitious claims. Russia also leaned heavily on state media to spread its message online.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry didn't respond to a request for comment, and Russia has denied spreading disinformation.

The Chinese ad spending accelerates a broader social-media effort -- which got a boost during last year's Hong Kong protests -- to shape opinion about China in the English-speaking world, researchers said.

China has bought more than 200 political ads on Facebook since the end of 2018, but more than a third have been purchased in the past two months, said Vanessa Molter, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cyber-policy institute. Most of the recent ads focused on trying to shape global perception around China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, she said.

Ms. Molter said China's state-media political advertising on Facebook has drawn as many as 109 million views over the past 14 months, about 45 million of them since Feb. 15. That reach is far larger than the estimated 40 million impressions that Stanford says Russia's Internet Research Agency obtained in its disinformation operations around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

As recently as Sunday, China Plus News, an English-language website operated by state-run China Radio International, was running ads promoting a podcast entitled "Coronavirus: What's Really Going On." The podcast, which began airing regular episodes on March 8, features information and opinions on the coronavirus pandemic, offered from China's perspective.

In one episode, the podcast states that none of the 42,000 medical workers operating in Hubei Province to combat the pandemic was infected with the virus. That health claim contradicts The Wall Street Journal's reporting, which found medical workers in China were infected because they lacked proper gear and training.

China's political ads by state media should be banned, said Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Facebook in October pledged to start labeling posts by state-run media on its platform early this year but hasn't. A company spokeswoman said "given state-controlled media uses the backing of a government to drive opinion, we remain committed to labeling these pages." She wouldn't say when the company would take the action. Twitter has banned advertising by state-run media, though it still allows these entities to post on its platform.

"I think this pandemic is a seminal moment" in China's image-building effort, said Priscilla Moriuchi, senior principal researcher at Recorded Future. China, she said, is using the crisis to portray itself as a global humanitarian leader more capable than the U.S.

China, which has banned Twitter domestically, has more than tripled accounts on the platform for government officials to 125 from a year ago, said the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a not-for-profit research group that is part of the German Marshall Fund think tank. Three-quarters of the new accounts have been created since September, the group said.

On March 12, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian floated the theory that the coronavirus may have been created by the U.S. Army. The U.S. military described that charge as "false & absurd."

On March 21, Mr. Zhao retweeted a message written by a Twitter user named The Lizard King, suggesting the coronavirus had been in the U.S. during the Christmas holidays. The tweet's author was Beatrice Ottomanelli, a 24-year-old grant writer living in Melbourne, Fla., who had about 500 followers before the message.

The somewhat random thought occurred to her when she was reflecting on advice doctors had given her to protect her infant son during last fall's flu season, she later said, adding that her tweet was retweeted about 10,000 times within a few hours after being posted on March 14. A week later, the response was amplified after it was retweeted by Mr. Zhao, someone she hadn't heard of before.

"I gained a whole lot of Chinese followers," Ms. Ottomanelli said, helping quintuple her following. "They're all very nice, but that was not my target audience."

Representatives of the Chinese government didn't respond to a request for comment about Mr. Zhao's tweets, and Mr. Zhao couldn't be reached for comment directly.

A Twitter spokesman said all accounts must abide by its rules, which are designed to prevent harm but don't prohibit "foreign policy saber-rattling on economic or military issues." As the pandemic evolves, Twitter wants "to create a public record, to offer people more context on what their leaders are saying, and to ensure they are able to hold their behavior to account," the spokesman said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has taken to Twitter to accuse China, as well as Russia and Iran, of spreading disinformation.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Twitter, said the outbreak might have been a U.S. biological-weapons attack. A European Union report found pro-Kremlin media were spreading messages aimed at undermining public trust in national health-care systems in Europe and suggesting that the Covid-19 virus was weaponized by the West. The Russian government denies it is spreading disinformation and called the EU report baseless and driven by Russiaphobia.

China's messaging could undermine U.S. influence, particularly in Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia, said Clint Watts, research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank. Conspiracy theories China has been advancing, he said, are likely to be amplified by Russia and Iran.

Those might not resonate in the U.S., he said, but "in the rest of the world, the more you hear it the more you believe it."

Write to Betsy Morris at betsy.morris@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 10, 2020 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)

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