Fake news, influencer pagati, Testate compiacenti e video falsi, la propaganda cinese non ha limiti

When we look at these disinformation campaigns, we see things that only create confusion. They pretend to be voters, and they exasperate polarization to sow confusion and discord in a foreign democracy. Fake online accounts, manipulated audio, deepfake. The Chinese regime manipulates Americans, Canadians, Taiwanese and more in an increasingly creative way. A deepfake video seems to be getting high. It was reposted by a series of fake accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Sarah Cook, an independent analyst on China, has been studying the Chinese regime's online campaigns for years and explains that there are five tactics the regime uses to influence the mass media. All you have to do is convince or deceive a single real journalist to influence the entire media ecosystem. This is American Thought Leaders, and I am Yannie Chielek. Sarah Cook, it's a pleasure to have you at American Thought Leaders. It's a pleasure to be here. Lately, I've been analyzing the advent of artificial intelligence. I've just tried the new functions of Grok. It's really surprising. And recently, the Chinese regime has very often used these deepfakes. What is happening? So, the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to influence the media around the world for many years. I believe that in the last decade, it has intensified its activity and has become more sophisticated, more coercive and more subdued. For example, Taiwan has always been its number one target. And in January, the elections were held. Some accounts, evidently linked to the Chinese government, have released a fake video based on a real interview in 2022 with a US senator in Ukraine. So, in view of the Taiwanese elections, this video pops up on TikTok. But the senator no longer talks about Ukraine. In the video, he says that if Taiwan wins the elections, the party displeased with the Chinese regime, the United States will increase military aid to Taiwan. He says this around how deepfake war is. In practice, he plays the game of propaganda that the PCC directs to the Taiwanese voters. That is, if you vote for this party, there will be war. If, on the other hand, you vote for the other party, which is more favorable to Beijing, there will be peace. AFP did the fact check of this video and unmasked it. The PCC took a video of an American deputy, altered the audio and tried to change the movement of the lips to make it look like he was making these fake comments during the elections in Taiwan. Another example is what happened in Canada. There have been several campaigns on profiles linked to China that have tried to damage the reputation of parliamentarians with a series of videos and posts in which they pretended to be a Chinese dissident who actually resides in Canada and made him say things about ethical violations and criminal acts that concerned Canadian politicians of every political party. And in these fake videos, this activist was also made to say things to discredit him, such as heavily denigrating and racist sentences against Muslims. So it's a situation where they use videos of real people, but their speeches are manipulated. And this seems to be a much more effective thing than the use of artificial intelligence avatars, which are easier to recognize. One of the most recent examples dates back to last month, this time in the Philippines, where the fake was about the current president, Marcos Junior. On the day of his speech to the people, a video is published that makes it look like he is using drugs, and then it turns out that the video had been published by some Filipino activists of the former president. It was a fake video amplified by a Chinese government consultant. They probably did it because they don't love Marcos Junior, because he has taken a much stronger position than the influence of China in the South China Sea. In short, there are many tactics and manipulations put in place against politicians from different countries. Artificial intelligence is therefore able to alter the lips and make it look like a person is speaking another language in an incredibly convincing way. I've seen it done personally, but this is just one of the many methods of the Chinese regime. Let's give the viewers a complete picture of how all this works. Sure. The Chinese Communist Party has a long tradition of influencing information around the world, which has intensified in the last ten years. In a project I worked on, we analyzed the situation in 30 countries, and the United States and Taiwan were the first two targets. But in the first places there were countries like the Philippines, Nigeria, Argentina and Kenya. It is therefore a global phenomenon, but this is a small part, as we have said, of what we call disinformation and content manipulation campaigns. Because there are five ways in which they influence the sphere of information outside. One is propaganda. Think of all the propaganda organs of the regime. Often it is evident that they are Chinese agents, but often they are also included in the local press. I put in their inserts, like China Watch, which are spread all over the world. We counted 130 headlines in 30 countries where they do these things. Then there is the element of disinformation. Excuse me if I interrupt you, because this word disinformation has been a bit abused in recent times. Some people use this term just because they don't like a content. What do you mean by disinformation? So I think one key element is that I think the discriminating factor is the deliberate spread of falsehood, of false or misleading content. More and more often it is a mix of truth and falsehood, which makes it more difficult to recognize. On top of that, often the tactics used to spread this content are coordinated and not spontaneous. You see entire networks of fake profiles acting in a coordinated way on social networks. Or they are influencers, who then find themselves being paid or controlled in any way by the regime. Maybe you see content appear simultaneously on six different platforms. That's what we mean most when we talk about disinformation campaigns, which are sometimes called influence operations. Or we talk about non-authentic coordinated behavior on social platforms, that is, coordinated and multiform actions aimed at deceiving users in a certain country, or even more countries. It is a relatively new phenomenon. The Russians have been doing it for a long time. China started around 2017. Then there is censorship. Propaganda and disinformation try to eliminate certain contents, while in censorship the Chinese regime uses the economy, bullying, violence and computer attacks to eliminate the contents it dislikes. And then you get to situations where companies with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party actually control the broadcasting infrastructure. And here we are not necessarily talking about suppressing the contents of a foreign television station, but of Chinese companies that manage digital television networks in some parts of Africa, or that are responsible for apps like WeChat and TikTok. And this is a different way in which manipulation can occur. And then the last one, which is seen a little more in the south of the world, is training. The attempt to export abroad the information control model that the PCC uses in China, teaching foreign officials how to influence public opinion. In short, here you see a massive operation that displaces several sectors of the party apparatus and the bureaucracy, and even external agents. And the ultimate goal is to make the world a safe place for the Chinese Communist Party, to denigrate enemies, to put China in good light, and more and more often, especially with disinformation campaigns, to sow confusion and discord in foreign democracies. Sometimes it is content that someone has published and that this machine, so to speak, amplifies. Maybe some are true, but extremely divisive. And this is probably the most difficult problem. Yes, especially if it is not clear that there are these false accounts networks. I believe that some of these are discovered and eliminated. And that's how I get to know them. Because there are IT security companies, ONG, think tank, technological companies that publish reports in which it is said, we closed these accounts and this was their operating mode. Sometimes this is the only way to find out. Obviously a user is not able to understand it. But when the material is eliminated, the damage is already done. In short, on this, it is not really the purpose of the interview, but there is a growing concern for censorship in Western democracies. It is a very difficult problem to deal with. Because obviously you want to give people the opportunity to communicate with each other. But there are these very effective forces in the sowing of mass discord and false information. And maybe in influencing elections. Yes, as I said, the Kremlin has been active in this field for a long time. But I think that sometimes resources are underestimated and the growing sophistication that the Chinese government is putting on the field. To date, they have not taken a massive action to try to change the outcome of the American elections. And I think it partly depends on the fact that there is a rare bipartisan consensus on the fact that the PCC is a problem and that we must have strong policies on human rights, trade, responsibility, Hong Kong, etc. I see many bipartisan activities in Parliament on these issues. And I think this helps the resilience of the Americans. But I think you also see examples like the one I mentioned about Taiwan. There are countless, or in the Philippines, where perhaps the PCC is less afraid that things will turn against it. So if there is a political will to use these tactics to try to influence the outcome of the elections, they do it. And all this gives an idea of ​​what could happen in the United States at the presidential level, at the legislative level, and more likely to happen, and in Taiwan, where independent MPs are targeted by the parties. It is more than anything else about understanding the position of that person towards the Chinese government, how much has been explicit in terms of human rights. In some cases, it is shocking and very evident that these are falsifications by American voters. It is a phenomenon that is becoming more and more frequent, as confirmed by the analysis of Microsoft or Meta, started around 2020. It was seen in the midterm elections of 2022, and now, in view of 2024, it is used more. These are real accounts that pretend to be American voters. Sometimes they publish more provocative and divisive content for both political parties. Sometimes it is precisely there that some of the memes generated by artificial intelligence are seen. In other cases, they use the same fake personalities on multiple platforms. In this way, of course, everything seems more real. An example are certain accounts that were spread by families of US military personnel. One of these accounts launched a petition on US policy towards Taiwan, trying to reduce US support for Taiwan, and obtained 300 signatures. So they impersonate real citizens. And the petition has a link to Taiwan, but most of the content has nothing to do with Taiwan. It talks about racial issues and other American social issues, so it is not easily traced back to China. Another recent discovery is that these accounts are starting to do surveys. Questions like, what do you think of this or that? In practice, they are trying to get answers from real voters, and the suspicion here is that it is a sort of informal operation of data collection on public opinion, of intelligence, and that these answers can then be used in future operations during elections to decide which content or which accounts are more credible, or things like that. So there is a constant evolution and a learning process by intelligence agencies, or Chinese regime propaganda, or whoever is behind all this. Let's move on to Taiwan, which is a microcosm. At the beginning I mentioned some shameful behavior, but they do everything and could use these methods anywhere. Yes, absolutely. And I believe that the 2018 elections in Taiwan were the first time the world has noticed that the Chinese Communist Party is doing disinformation similar to that of the Kremlin, trying to influence the elections with the use of content farms, false accounts and false information of all kinds. And then with every subsequent election in Taiwan in 2020, and now with the political elections in January 2024, there has been an evolution, with the use of artificial and generative intelligence and with false audio. And this is even more manipulative and insidious, because in this way there are not even some of the clues that could be obtained with a video. One of the most disconcerting examples in Taiwan regarding the use of manipulated audio was the day of the elections. There was an important magnate who had run for office, but had not yet supported any of the two candidates. On the day of the elections, an audio of a person who pretended to be him came out declaring that he supported the candidate in favor of Beijing. Other times they said that the winner of the elections had a lover and illegitimate children, and they published it. There have also been false DNA tests and things like that, or the avatars of artificial intelligence that were made by media leaders to report the news. An element of this campaign was an e-book on the secret history of former President Tsai Ing-wen. It was full of lies and various accusations, and it was broadcast a couple of weeks before the elections on various platforms. And that's what we mean when we talk about coordination. In some cases, this content is also sent to real journalists. In this way, it is enough for a single real journalist to be convinced or deceived and take the news back, to get it into the media ecosystem. In Taiwan, they arrested an online journalist for publishing results of false polls and discovered that he had relations with officials of the Chinese regime in Fujian province. The journalist published the results of these polls, claiming that the pro-Beijing candidate was in the lead in the polls. In part, it is about making the pro-Beijing candidates seem more popular than they really are. And then they try to insert information that creates scandals and makes people question the integrity of the pro-Beijing candidates, to discredit the disliked part and make the other look popular. Taiwan is a relatively new democratic state and very proud of its democratic regime. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why people respond immediately and are skeptical, because they realize that they are in the mirror of the Beijing regime, which then puts its own, with all the various air raids, etc. At Epoch Times we deal a lot with various persecuted minorities, in particular transnational repression. These methods are used in a transversal way. I know it's a topic you wrote about. These disinformation campaigns of the Chinese regime have three goals. Politicians, but it is a latent ability. Then they pollute the democratic process, pretending to be electors and exasperating the already existing polarization. And the third is to target those who perceive them as enemies of the PCC. For example, recently an American YouTuber went to China. We were at the peak of the evidence of mass arrests of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and of people who disappear in a very high number. He accuses that the Chinese regime rejects them. In short, this American YouTuber goes to China, to Urumqi, and talks to these Uyghurs, showing how happy they are and so on. But then it turns out that the trip is paid by the propaganda organs of the Chinese regime. This is just an example. There are other more coordinated and manipulated campaigns. There are videos of Uyghurs who say they are happy, who say that everything is fine and that there are no arrests, etc. And they are promoted and published in extremely suspicious ways. Normal people do not publish spontaneously in that way, not to mention that YouTube is banned in China. Some Uyghurs were arrested precisely because they had used a VPN to access our social networks. So how is it that all of a sudden all these Uyghurs can go to YouTube and talk about how beautiful things are and how beautiful life is? Very suspicious. This is an example. The Tibetans and the inhabitants of Hong Kong have been targeted by various computer attacks. Sometimes there are also personalization of profiles. If I'm not mistaken, one of the recent accounts removed by META concerns people who pretended to be Tibetan activists and even a false consultant of Human Rights Watch who defamed the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile accusing them of corruption, pedophilia and things like that. So even in this case it is about discrediting the enemies of the PCC. And then there is the report published last week by the Falun Dafa Information Center which talks about a new campaign against Falun Gong practitioners. Some internal documents removed talk about the broader planning which includes three of the tactics mentioned two of which have already been observed that is, some very suspicious YouTubers who publish content which in part are obviously false and in part are a strange mixture of false and some truth but difficult to distinguish. They defame Falun Gong and also the Shengyu Performing Arts. Then there are examples of impersonation of accounts on Wix and more generally this impersonation tactic is widely used by the PCC. This begins to be very suspicious it is not just one or two people who say things in vain. Now we have imitations of accounts and reserved documents which say that the Ministry of the Interior orders to fully support these YouTubers to provide their information to use the army of 50 cents that is, the army of trolls and false accounts to amplify them. They say to make a think tank of the Chinese regime talk about it to start manipulating indeed it seems to me they use the word defamation on Falun Gong in the results of research worldwide. So you start to see these campaigns at more levels there is a lot of misinformation in China that targets Uighurs, Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners but here we are talking about communities outside China. The PCC tries to influence public opinion towards these groups so that they do not receive support for the atrocities on human rights they are suffering but also because some of these communities are among the most critical voices outside China towards the Chinese government the PCC is using these tactics to discredit its enemies. I think it is interesting to look at the internal materials of the PCC because sometimes it itself publishes them on the Internet one of the things that for me was a real gold mine in my research was to consult the websites of the local Chinese government and see how at the local level they talk about how these minorities are persecuted how Chinese activists are persecuted and what is done in terms of rewards when you get to the local level they can be extraordinarily transparent obviously if you can read among the lines the degree of repression they are using I think that these campaigns aimed at the outside world and some of these news leaks usually come from some kind of internal source that is close to the outside world or to a particular community or cause for example in December before the Taiwan elections there was a Reuters news on a note taken from a meeting that coordinated their action that was very explicit on how they would try to influence the Taiwan elections there were two things in particular one was the attempt to influence the media and social media through this kind of coordinated attacks the other was to try to encourage those who live in China but are originally from Taiwan and tend to be more Chinese-like to come back to Taiwan to vote offering low-cost flights and things like that and then this series of documents contained in the last report are very similar in the sense that they do not publish the entire document they are notes of internal meetings meetings between the Ministry of the Interior and a think tank and a financial entity of the regime I think this is one of those really difficult things to document because it actually happens outside the platform people are co-opted offline and then they give their support in online content sometimes they look like authentic people while in other cases they are real influencers who usually publish other content but to whom it was asked to make propaganda sometimes we have found these cases an example is what I mentioned earlier on Xinjiang there was another example and it is the merit of two American YouTubers who followed the trail to unmask an organization of the PCC in practice a Hong Kong company had sent an email to 100 English-speaking YouTubers claiming that there was a promotional opportunity related to the sharing of some content on tourism in China they thought it was a bit suspicious and pretended to want to do it so they accepted and then they received the response that is, the promotion is over but we have another client and we offer you $2,000 to insert this material already ready that we give you material that claims that COVID originated from the deer of the United States these two YouTubers refused but they had a whole exchange of emails and they publicly denounced it making two videos on each of their channels telling everything but one of the places where I like to dig the most are the documents of the registration of foreign actors in the United States the FARA yes, exactly, here you can find traces of money there is a group of public relations companies that do all kinds of things and try to influence American newspapers on behalf of various subjects of the United Front that is, the Chinese regime one was the PR company with a contract with the consulate of New York to promote the Beijing Winter Olympics through influencers on social media and this is an example where the content may not be misinformation as it was in the case of the origin of COVID from deer but it shows the existence of money flow through different intermediate levels the case of the influencers is much more insidious because it is more manipulative it is not a situation in which you simply create a false profile from nothing and suddenly you start doing these things now the point is that even without giving direct funding the Chinese regime has many false accounts and YouTube and some of these websites are based on monetization so sometimes there is a not outlined countdown which could be I know that if I publish this message it could be amplified and so suddenly this influencer reaches 100,000 followers and has a video with 600,000 views and so obviously he has earned more money than just doing his normal views so the amplification happens in part thanks to Chinese account networks sometimes it is difficult to prove but we know that they do it to make them seem more popular than they really are Let's go back to these two YouTubers at some point they tried to find current employees of Shen Yun Discontent and they found a surprising number of these people who then ended up in a subsequent reportage of the New York Times How common is this type of approach? The Chinese government and I think you can see it especially in Taiwan and sometimes there can be a precise action but many times it is automatic so there is an unintentional amplification as you can have from other influencers in 2020 a study by the University of Cardiff found that these accounts linked to the Chinese regime published things like for example that during the elections electoral cards were burned and they were retweeted by real people and they spread and got a million views In the Freedom House study similar examples have been found in 13 of the 30 countries in Spanish, in other languages a real influencer can see a content and amplify it without knowing that it actually comes from a fake account and that's how he gets the likes when you read the technical reports on these fake accounts usually fake accounts don't have much following but just one tweet is amplified by one with 800,000 followers that suddenly becomes mainstream there is a resonance box and at this point the mainstream media say what's going on here let's make a piece too and here we often take advantage of our political division and our existing vulnerabilities We could talk for hours about the manipulation of platforms I've had many guests in the program who have talked about TikTok something very important and very little understood in America we know that TikTok is a significant tool of influence of the Chinese regime there are other similar platforms there is also WeChat but many don't even know what it is I would like to talk a little bit about WeChat because I think it is a real weakness and I think it shows that what they do in Taiwan they could do it here too on TikTok for example WeChat is owned by the Chinese company Tencent in China it is strongly censored and monitored and it is omnipresent because in China it is necessary not only to communicate with anyone but also to pay, to order something it is omnipresent and is used everywhere in China if they close your WeChat account they heavily limit your life now this platform is available all over the world and the difference that Bytedance makes with TikTok outside of China and Douyin inside does not exist with WeChat it is the same platform everywhere there are some differences regarding accounts but if you really want to have an account to reach a large number of people you need to have a Chinese identity document or a company registered in China so it is widely used by many Chinese in countries like Australia, the United States and Canada I was just about to say Canada Yes, so there is this Chinese company that does not even pretend to be separated from the PCC as TikTok does and that in fact decides who can talk to who who can talk to American voters of Chinese language what content is shared, what content is amplified what Chinese Americans can say to other Chinese Americans and to the voters there have been many complaints in California there is a complaint of censorship against WeChat by a group of American Chinese who published something about the protests in Hong Kong in 2019 their account was closed causing economic damage because they also used it to promote their activities many of their customers were American Chinese and took appointments through the app As for the elections in Canada, for example, there have been some campaigns aimed at specific MPs in particular four MPs three of whom are of Asian origin one of them was the subject of a defamatory campaign on WeChat because he is from Hong Kong and the consulate did not like what he said about Hong Kong they thought it was too critical and that it would introduce policies that could allow the entry of a larger number of refugees who are now fleeing Hong Kong after the deterioration of the situation so there was a defamation campaign using the WeChat app and then there is also the offline manipulation in which the Chinese consulate puts pressure on local organizations of the Chinese community so that they do not invite candidates to speak to their voters or they try to put pressure on people so that they do not volunteer for some campaigns or even, in some cases, not to vote for them so candidates who try to represent the Asian-Canadian community in an authentic way are basically cut out excluded due to the greater influence of the Chinese Communist Party in some of these communities and in the United States Exactly These channels are completely penetrated in the US cable TV and not only in the Chinese language as, for example, CGTN in Spanish When I think one of the things I did when I looked at the influence in the United States I looked at the cable TV packages in Chinese and I found that there was a lot of influence and it is CCTV a Taiwanese broadcaster known to be Chinese-Chinese Phoenix TV based in Hong Kong whose previous owner had ties with the Chinese military and is now purchased by a Chinese state entity and then other Hong Kong channels which are now among the last ones left This is the cable package usually purchased in most of the United States This is to say how there are more levels of influence and this, I believe, is a serious disservice for Americans of the Chinese language without access to the Internet Online there are obviously many more opportunities for information but for those who live in a world made only of newspapers or for those who read only WeChat as many American Chinese do the vision of reality can be very distorted and not only of Chinese reality but also of American reality where these people live or maybe they live in the cities where they can see NTDTV, our Chinese-associated television network All this is really disturbing and obviously has consequences There is an aspect that in some ways is more difficult to describe It is very difficult to be a journalist in today's China There has been a kind of reciprocity in the last administration that has repatriated some people but you have to accept some rules written and not written rather rigid to be able to do journalism in China and in general a head to many restrictions How does the regime force journalists to behave who want to work there? When we talk about censorship the pressures and restrictions on foreign correspondents are a key tactic that is articulated on several levels Many foreign newspapers are banned Their websites are censored in China so even if they produce content in Chinese they are practically cut off from the market It is surprising that subjects like the United States are not so involved because it is a commercial matter The Chinese regime does not want to read news about China written by independent newspapers As for correspondents there are restrictions on appearances and not only Those who try to make reports in a certain part of the country can be criticized And then there is a serious obstacle and it happens more and more that is the pressure on the sources so for the Chinese it is increasingly dangerous to talk to foreign journalists And then there is another more recent phenomenon that the Association of Foreign Correspondents in China talks about The Chinese release a statement and now they are accusing foreign correspondents accusing them of citing them without authorization And then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs checks whoever can help the journalist So if you go on a trip for a report in Beijing or Shanghai in practice they check who can be your driver who can be your translator if you need it who can be your guide who cleans the offices These people must register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs First of all, this creates a whole series of surveillance even non-digital not to mention the level of digital surveillance that foreign correspondents undergo And then there is also the fact that trying to tell facts that the PCC does not want and knows puts the Chinese in danger and the regime knows that this is a deterrent for foreign correspondents The number of foreign correspondents has decreased and not only Americans Before there were four or five Indian correspondents There was a colleague who did excellent reports He was able to ask the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for information on a Freedom House report And the answer was It's all false Which obviously meant that it was all true All four of these correspondents were fired This also happened to European correspondents And then again many African heads cannot keep correspondents in China because it is incredibly expensive and it can take a year even just to get the visa In short, in my opinion the control over journalism in China Let's turn the question around The reality that you describe What impact can it have on the way that, for example, some of these newspapers talk about the Chinese in America? Yes, I mean I would say that's only one of the many instruments of pressure In some cases it was used to put pressure on the mass media around the world Another problem are the large mass media conglomerates that have other contents especially sports or entertainment that are trying to enter China Let's remember the case of the Houston Rockets manager who tweeted about the protests in Hong Kong ESPN received a lot of negative criticism for having broadcast it in China And there was also a note from an ESPN chief of staff ordering journalists to pay attention to how the protests in Hong Kong were treated Not to mention the NBA agreements in China and things like that And if you go into broader issues like the China Daily that gives money to publishers to print inserts sometimes millions of dollars in some cases they give money just to print the paper editions So there are an infinity of instruments of influence One of the phenomena is the offer of free trips in China by the Chinese government and sometimes they are complete scholarship very tempting for poor nations They go to learn Chinese And here we have a combination of real skills taught together with propaganda with lessons on the Marxist way of doing journalism Or there are guided visits aimed at making people believe that China is a democracy because it has a parliament And journalists who did not know it especially those who come from Latin America from Africa, maybe then they go home and say China is really a democracy I had never understood how open and democratic it was And so you have the joint action of the newspapers and the influencers on social media And it also happens in the West Even Huawei does it If I'm not mistaken, Josh Rogin of the Washington Post said he received an email from Huawei offering him a trip to China Usually those who know China do not fall for it But then the regime no longer goes to the correspondents of China but to the leaders of the mass media or to people who deal with other issues and who are not specialized in China And of course these people will be more subject to be convinced So there is an influence at the level of mass media property and finance And then sometimes there is the targeting and the cooperation of the journalists themselves And here you can have a mixed situation within a certain newspaper On the one hand, you can have correspondents from China very competent and very valid services On the other hand, pieces that seem to be written under the dictation of some bureaucrats of the Chinese regime And often they are journalists who are not experts in China One thing that came to mind is an article in the New York Times written by Regina Ip a high-ranking Hong Kong official very favorable to Beijing who talked about the law on national security and how great it is for Hong Kong What do you think of things like this? The idea of publishing articles of opinion by Chinese officials or by various types of officials is quite common In the United States, for a certain period there have been public relations companies that have stipulated contracts with the Chinese embassy to publish articles of Chinese officials in the main American newspapers But it happens everywhere In Nigeria, a newspaper had a section that reported only comments from the Chinese consulate There is therefore the problem of deciding who can publish the articles of opinion If a Chinese official writes it there should be an opposite point of view What kind of fact-checking do you do? In some cases, even in the United States There are interviews with Chinese officials that are transcribed and then published with the prohibition of modifying them Or maybe it was the Chinese regime that decided the questions This is to give greater credibility to the Chinese official and to ensure that the journalist receives the approval to interview the Chinese official I have analyzed some interviews that several Chinese ambassadors have given to the main US headquarters such as CNN, NPR, or Meet the Press On the one hand, the journalists often tried to be sly and to put the ambassador in trouble On the other hand, these ambassadors are very cunning and know how to trick So basically, by doing this they continue to provide a public of millions and millions of American consumers with the statements of a Chinese ambassador for example on COVID, which we know to be false Sometimes we are faced with the question of the articles of opinion that are written by other intermediaries that are not revealed There was a case in Romania where someone wrote on Huawei saying that we should not worry about security issues related to Huawei and 5G It was later discovered that in reality it was paid by Huawei There have been cases of commentators in the United States or think tanks who received funding through multiple other intermediaries linked to the United Front and Hong Kong officials and who wrote editorials on local American newspapers in which they encouraged to engage more with China, to make more investments, more trade, etc. I think this is the point where the situation becomes really turbid In terms of newspapers, for example, it is necessary to have clearer guidelines on transparency or identification both for the inserts that the Chinese government inserts in local media and for the articles published by people who clearly represent the Chinese regime For this purpose, it is necessary at least to have a real fact-checking and to have the rule of law that would normally apply to anyone The news that triggers the most anger of the Chinese regime are those on human rights Let's talk about this Well, I think the merit is that there are independent newspapers all over the world who are trying to discover the things that the PCC wants to hide A lot of what we know about Xinjiang and how Uyghurs are persecuted, about Tibet, about what happens to lawyers for human rights, about Hong Kong and what happens to the detainees, is due to the coverage of some Western heads In some cases it is Western media in others it is Chinese media in others it is participating journalists who run many risks For TV journalists it is particularly difficult to interview them in China because it is forbidden to record the images of the police beating up old protesters who complain about pensions not to mention interviewing someone who is even more threatened like a Uyghur in China or a Falun Gong practitioner Another gap is represented by the finances of the Chinese leaders In some cases some pieces have been published and it is not about human rights but it is still very important and the PCC does not want it to be known There have been excellent investigative articles but we also know that there has been censorship from above, especially in Bloomberg to stop this kind of reporting and then I think that cases like the Falun Gong human rights crisis in China still remain a big gap Some of the strategies and sources that have been used to discover what is happening in Xinjiang to highlight what is happening in Tibet to show what is happening for example to the protests of the white paper and things like that should be used for other issues like the persecution of Falun Gong or the persecution of Christians which is not talked about much but in reality it influences many Chinese people all over China, not only in the peripheries and in the different regions and then it has many other implications on the Chinese governance because for example if we talk about Han Chinese arbitrarily detained or tortured to death it is different from what is happening in Xinjiang which is a minority area what happens there is still something horrible and tragic for those families but if we talk about broader implications related to the rule of law what happens in Fujian or Liaoning or Guangzhou is different, they are parts of China where businessmen and foreign diplomats have more possibilities to get away for this reason I think it is necessary to talk more about some of these types of abuses that occur there and really think what it means for us to understand today's China I think these are some of the gaps that it would be nice to see filled using perhaps more diversified sources or some kind of different ingenuity because it is really important to understand what is really happening in today's China and the implications not only for China but also for the United States or for the rest of the world Well, look, I think one of the things that was really helpful in my research over the last 10 years is that there is a real capacity for resilience we should not overestimate the capacity of the PCC nor underestimate what the little things can do One of the things that we have discovered is that of the 30 countries we have examined at least half have shown resilience Taiwan and the United States had very high levels of resilience In some cases, however, all that is needed is a report on how the PCC acts on its influence This can have a really significant impact in terms of awareness like, for example, exposing these disinformation campaigns In Italy, there was a journalist who wrote two articles One article describes how he found a fake campaign on Twitter that made Italians believe that they should thank China for the COVID aid a much larger number than they actually did In another article, he examined the contents of the public broadcaster which has drawn some of these agreements with the Chinese state media and the way in which the latter spoke of China and there was a lot of imbalance These articles had a huge impact I think these are the kinds of things that sometimes one or two people in the country or a group of NGOs are enough and some of these data analysis and systematic investigations like those that are done by civil society in places like Taiwan to make people more aware of the tactics They provide the government and the tech companies with information on what they can do and raise public opinion about the fact that this is a real thing and it could happen And I repeat, it is not limited to places like Taiwan or the West There are training courses for journalists in Africa Some new think tanks are being born There are projects in places like Poland or Romania and things like that It is really stimulating to see the level of awareness and commitment that in some cases people are putting because they see what is happening They are not so worried about the great rivalry between the United States and China as they are about the invasion of the freedom of the media of national sovereignty and of the electoral integrity of their countries There is still a lot of work to be done I think that for ordinary users if you see something that is too much in line with what the Chinese Communist Party wants you to believe you should be a little skeptical I would like to encourage people to keep an eye on this kind of accounts because, I repeat, sometimes it is a little more obvious like for example a clear goal of the Chinese Communist Party but if it is someone who has a fake account that impersonates other American voters it is much more difficult to identify So I think that one of the areas of democratic resilience that we have is to try to reduce political polarization to maintain some of these bipartisan areas to invest in national entities that can carry out these investigations and revelations and also to support our Chinese diaspora in being able to have access to better and more information not only about China but also about what is happening in America We are in the closing Sara, you have a new sub-stack on which you are writing and of which I will be a keen reader because I love your work. Can you tell us about it? It is called Under Reporter China The idea is to examine some of these problems some of these things whether it is the persecution of some minorities of political prisoners of which no one speaks or to use all these ways and different sources to see how the Chinese Communist Party is trying to influence the media and the information outside China and try to reveal all this The intention is also to give people the opportunity to understand it better both for the work I am doing myself and to try to amplify the really good work that is carried out all over the world by the people who deal with this but whose voices are sometimes silenced so we want to give them a push Sara Cooke, it was a pleasure It was a pleasure for me Thank you all from Jan Jekielek for joining me and Sara Cooke in this episode of American Thought Leaders