Global Affairs Canada revealed Monday that a social media campaign linked to the People’s Republic of China is targeting dozens of federal MPs with disinformation and propaganda.
Global Affairs says that since the beginning of August, and with increasing magnitude over the Labor Day long weekend, a network of “zombie computers” has left thousands of propaganda and disinformation messages, in English and in French, on the Facebook and X / Twitter accounts of Canadian federal deputies.
According to Global Affairs, these spam emails claimed that a critic of the Chinese Communist Party in Canada had accused the targeted MPs of criminal offenses and ethical violations. The “spam cover-up” campaign also included the use of faked videos that targeted these MPs, Global Affairs said in a statement.
This campaign targeted dozens of MPs from all parties and several regions, including the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre, and several ministers, the press release indicates.
Global Affairs says all MPs were briefed on the campaign and given advice on how to protect themselves from foreign interference. “In addition, they were told that nothing that had been observed during this analysis represented a threat to their safety or that of their family,” it says.
The objective of this operation was assessed by “Canada’s Rapid Response Mechanism”, a service under Global Affairs that monitors digital disinformation sponsored by foreign states and provides data on threats to democracy.
According to this service, the operation “probably aimed to discredit and denigrate the MPs targeted in apparently organic messages, alleging irregularities, disseminated in waves of publications and videos on social media, which questioned political norms and ethics of these MPs, using a well-known Chinese-speaking personality in Canada.
The operation was also likely intended to “silence criticism of the Chinese Communist Party by encouraging MPs to distance themselves from this critic and discouraging the large online community from communicating with this person.”
“Global Affairs Canada took the initiative to communicate with the affected platforms and inform them of the spamming activity, which resulted in the removal of a large portion of the activity and the network,” the statement said.
Spamming is a tactic that involves using a network of botnets and new or hacked social media accounts to post propaganda messages across multiple platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, Medium, Reddit, TikTok and LinkedIn.
These networks “are largely contained within their own echo chambers of fake users and rarely generate organic engagement from truthful users on social media,” recalls Global Affairs.
These are the same networks of “zombie computers” that spread disinformation claiming that the Hawaii wildfires were caused by a secret U.S. military “weather weapon.” They have also been linked to misinformation about the water spill in Fukushima, Japan, in August.