How China, Russia and Iran enhance COVID disinformation

China, Russia and Iran– making use of one another’s online disinformation– amplified false theories that the COVID-19 infection came from a U.S. bioweapons lab or was created by Washington to compromise their countries, according to a nine-month examination by AP and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab

Why it matters: Through a series of overlapping, if slapdash, efforts, America’s global foes benefited from equally strengthening counter-narratives propagated online that intended to wrongly place duty for the pandemic on the U.S. and typically to sow doubt on its actual origin within China.

• The comprehensive use by these countries of each other’s COVID-19 disinformation shows simply how international– and equally enhancing– these online networks have become.
• The examination was “based upon an evaluation of countless social networks posts and posts on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram and other platforms,” states the AP.

Information: Although seemingly less coordinated than other such efforts, comprehensive anti-American COVID-19 disinformation efforts first appeared in Russia, according to the AP/ DFRLab report.

• A Russian military media outlet was the first recognized publication that ran a story advancing the claim that COVID-19 was American, not Chinese, in origin.
• In the first few months of 2020, “more than 70 articles appeared in pro-Kremlin media making comparable bioweapons claims in Russian, Spanish, Armenian, Arabic, English and German,” composes AP.

However, “it was China– not Russia– that took the lead in spreading out foreign disinformation about COVID-19’s origins, as it came under attack for its early handling of the outbreak,” states the report.

• By March 2020, Chinese state media outlets, along with diplomats on social networks, were pressing the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was a biological weapon produced by the United States at Fort Detrick in Maryland and gave China throughout the 2019 Armed Force World Games, which were held that October in Wuhan.
• That month, “a confidential petition appeared on the White House’s now-defunct ‘We individuals’ website. It prompted U.S. authorities to clarify whether the infection had actually been developed at Fort Detrick and dripped from the laboratory. The petition was extravagantly covered by China’s state media, despite getting only 1,426 signatures,” writes AP.
• By May, Chinese state media broadcast “a slick documentary about Fort Detrick set to scary music that has actually been viewed on its YouTube channel more than 82,000 times” and “played on China’s Bilibili platform 378,000 times.”
• Chinese diplomats also started extensively posting COVID-related disinformation on Twitter, which is banned in China itself.
• On popular social media networks within China like Weibo, viral posts drew from Russian and Chinese disinformation to spread the false “U.S. bioweapons” theory of COVID-19

Of note: Instead of utilizing botnets or Russian IRA-type giant farms, the Chinese counted on their vast network of state-affiliated news outlets, as well as Chinese federal government accounts on social media, to propagate these incorrect theories, composes DFRLab.

Iranian leaders, on the other hand, also started to push out incorrect claims– Russian and Chinese in origin– that COVID-19 was a U.S. bioweapon designed to target Washington’s enemies.

• The Iranians’ false claims “were, in turn, enhanced by Russian media and picked up in China, where they fueled more speculation,” composes AP.
• An Iranian disinformation network active on Facebook, Google and Twitter also “triggered a network of sites and concealed social media accounts to implicate the U.S. of engineering the virus and praise[d] the leadership and benevolence of China,” writes the AP.

Yes, but: The DFRLab report likewise explores how a different, previously stream of disinformation– revolving around the incorrect assertion that COVID-19 was purposefully leaked from a Chinese laboratory– spread online through U.S.-based reactionary networks like QAnon and eventually bled into right-wing media more broadly.

• ” The standard view about conspiracy theories is that they exist along the fringes of the details area, apart from the mainstream and main communications. However, in the United States, these conspiracy theories have permeated all layers of discourse, especially being embraced by components of mainstream media and individual conservative policymakers during the Trump administration,” composes DFRLab.
• Chinese government disinformation pressing the incorrect “U.S. bioweapons thesis” about COVID-19 followed this earlier U.S.-based conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon– paralleling and inverting it.

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