Tag: Conspiracy Theories

Biden’s First TikTok Post Jokes About Super Bowl Conspiracy Theory

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Did President Biden cunningly rig the Super Bowl so the Kansas City Chiefs would win? “I’d get in trouble if I told you,” Mr. Biden joked in his campaign’s inaugural post on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that has 170 million U.S. users but few high-level American politicians. The video then cut to an image of the “Dark Brandon” meme — another attempt from the campaign to flip a right-wing conspiracy theory on its head. Mr. Biden’s arrival to TikTok, and the lighthearted nature of his post, pointed to…

Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

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Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments. President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof —…

China Sows Disinformation About Hawaii Fires Using New Techniques

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When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced. The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign. For China —…

China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World

Chin@Strategy

When Twitter put up a warning message atop a Russian government post denying civilian killings in Bucha, Ukraine, last week, China’s state media rushed to its defense. “On Twitter @mfa_russia’s statement on #Bucha got censored,” wrote Frontline, a Twitter account associated with China’s official English-language broadcaster, CGTN. In a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, an article declared that Russians had offered definitive evidence to prove that the lurid photos of bodies in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, were a hoax. A party television station in Shanghai…

Biden Officials Contend With Bioweapons Propaganda From Russia and China

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — One of Russia’s most incendiary disinformation campaigns ramped up days ago, when its defense and foreign ministries issued statements falsely claiming that the Pentagon was financing biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Then Chinese diplomats and state media organizations repeated the conspiracy theory at news conferences in Beijing, in articles and on official social media accounts. Now, the Biden White House has taken the extraordinary step of calling out both countries on their coordinated propaganda campaign and saying they might be providing cover for a potential biological or chemical…

Rejecting Covid-19 Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming US

Chin@Strategy

Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak, and it rejected the health agency’s recent call for a second phase of an inquiry that would look more closely at the lab theory. China has been ramping up its disinformation campaign ahead of the results of an investigation by American intelligence agencies, ordered by President Biden. The agencies delivered their report on the origin of the pandemic to the president on Tuesday but have not yet concluded whether…