China is conducting an extensive COVID-19 disinformation campaign through news and social media, aimed at advancing a conspiracy theory that the US devised and released the contamination as a bioweapon, according to a new study.
A nine-month investigation published by the Associated Press on Monday describes how the communist government has spread the malicious lie like a virus in itself.
On January 26, 2020 – less than a week after the first case of the coronavirus was diagnosed on US soil – a man from China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region posted a video on the Chinese app Kuaishou claiming it was then a new virus developed by according to the study.
The video has been removed and its creator has been arrested, held for 10 days and fined for spreading the false story.
But within weeks, that same theory was put forth by Chinese diplomats around the world, as well as the vast web of state-run media back home.
The false rejection came when China was intensively investigated for its early approach to the coronavirus – which had escaped the country’s quarantine and became international – and was confronted with a similar theory that the outbreak originated in a Chinese laboratory, which has since been considered ‘extremely unlikely’. by international health experts.
On Feb. 22, the People’s Daily – an internationally distributed newspaper that serves as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party – shot back with a report based on speculation that the US military was introducing the coronavirus into China, the AP report said.
That report not only resonated at home, but gained worldwide traction, appearing in inserts in the New Zealand Herald and Helsinki Times in Finland.
On March 9, an essay claiming that the U.S. military had created the virus in a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland and released it during the Military World Games athletics competition – held in October 2019 in Wuhan, China, from which the virus originated – on WeChat, another Chinese social media platform.
The next day, an anonymous online petition was filed with the White House’s “We the People” site demanding that the US government respond to the Fort Detrick theory, the AP said.
While the petition yielded less than 2 percent of the 100,000 signatures it took to get a response from the White House, the fact that it was filed was widely discussed in the Chinese media.
Days later, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, unleashed a wave of tweets reinforcing the essay’s bizarre theory.
“When did Patient Zero start in the US?” Zhao wrote to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It could be the US military that brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make your data public! US due [sic] us an explanation! “
Twitter later slammed the post with a fact-check warning, according to the AP – but in English only, leaving the Mandarin version of the tweet untouched.
All told, the 11 tweets Zhao fired on March 12 and 13 were cited more than 99,000 times in at least 54 languages over the ensuing six weeks, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which collaborated with the US on the investigation. AP. .
The accounts referencing those tweets, in turn, have nearly 275 million followers, according to the AP, which notes that that sum almost certainly involves some degree of overlap.
Ironically, tweets criticizing Zhao’s conspiracy theory – like Donald Trump Jr.’s broadsides spread. – the premise to the widest audience, the AP noted.
Dozens of accounts related to Chinese diplomats, based in countries from France to Panama, also echoed the theory, exposing the European and Latin American public to the conspiracy.
Accounts related to Saudi Arabia’s royal family also gave weight to the hoax, as did the state media in Russia and Iran, the investigation found.
The spread created a self-feeding cycle, with leaders in Russia and Iran who expressed their views on the China-created conspiracy making news in China, further fueling speculation.
“Did the US government deliberately hide the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” was the leading question posed in an opinion piece published March 22 by China Radio International. Why was the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, closed in July 2019? “
Within days, that piece was reprinted more than 350 times around the world, mostly in Chinese, but also in English, Arabic, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, the AP said.
Accounts promoting opinion on various social media platforms reached a total of 817 million followers, a total, again, almost certain to include some redundant accounts, an audit found.
The Fort Detrick conspiracy has never fully died since, and was resurrected in tweets from Zhao last month and by a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry last month, opposing further suggestions from the then-outgoing Trump administration that it virus could have escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.
“I would like to emphasize that if the United States really respects the facts, it should open the biology lab at Fort Detrick, provide greater transparency on issues such as their more than 200 overseas biolabs, and invite WHO experts to review origins in the United States, ”spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a January 18 press conference that went viral in China.
In a statement to the AP, the ministry insisted that China had the right to defend itself against conspiracy theories coming their way, and was committed to rectifying the facts.
“All parties should say firmly ‘no’ to the spread of disinformation,” the ministry said. “In the face of fabricated charges, it is justified and appropriate to debunk lies and clarify rumors by exposing the facts.”