The Chinese government opposes the idea of allowing the World Health Organization (WHO) to further investigate the country into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and does not hesitate to intervene aggressively online about it, even going so far, suggests the Meta firm, to create a fake researcher to assert its point of view.
The company that owns Facebook detailed in a recent report the ploy used, which centered on the writings of a social network user officially posing as a Swiss biologist named Wilson Edwards.
Meta analyst Ben Nimmo writes that China’s launched disinformation campaign was “essentially a mirror game” aimed at “endlessly mirroring” the words of a non-existent person.
The fake researcher’s account was created on July 24, a few days after Beijing officially declared its opposition to the WHO’s desire to continue its research on Chinese soil into the origins of the pandemic.
The international organization made the announcement in response to criticism from many countries, including the United States, which accused a team of researchers sent to China at the start of the year for having too quickly dismissed the hypothesis of a leak. laboratory to favor the dominant hypothesis of a natural transfer of the virus from an animal.
Relayed messages
After posting a few posts on trivial matters, the person writing under the pseudonym Wilson Edwards got to the heart of the matter by claiming that the US administration was actively seeking to “intimidate” the researchers in question.
“The United States is so obsessed with the idea of attacking China on the issue of origin [de la pandémie] that they are reluctant to recognize the facts, ”he stressed.
Hundreds of fake accounts as well as many real apartment accounts of individuals working for companies linked to the Chinese government then picked up the message and spread it out.
Meta notes that a few messages from this informal network even contained guidelines in Chinese stressing the need to aim for accounts from abroad and to report on the echoes received.
Chinese state media picked up the bogus Wilson Edwards’ “staggering” statements a week later, in turn circulating the idea of US intimidation.
Meta intervention
The Swiss embassy in China sounded the alarm last August by noting, in an ironic tone, that it would very much like to meet the researcher since no Swiss citizen of that name could be found. “If you exist, we would like to meet you. But it is more likely to be false information, ”noted the embassy.
Meta quickly removed the account before expanding its investigation and coming to the conclusion that it was necessary to remove 500 more accounts to end this propaganda campaign.
Richard Ebright, a researcher attached to Rutgers University who denounces the failures of the investigation carried out to date by the WHO into the origins of the pandemic, is not unduly surprised by the ploy observed on Facebook.
Chinese authorities have already made it clear that they will oppose any investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 that focuses solely on China.
Richard Ebright, Research Fellow at Rutgers University
Beijing, he adds, has however made it known on several occasions that an investigation into both the potential role of the United States and that of China would be acceptable to it.
“American weapon”
In March 2020, a spokesperson for China’s foreign minister wrote several tweets claiming, without evidence, that the virus was in fact a US weapon produced in an army lab in Maryland and subsequently brought into Wuhan.
The organization Reporters Without Borders noted in a recent report that the thesis, seen as another Chinese propaganda effort, was cited more than 100,000 times in more than 54 languages in the following six weeks.
The organization warns that the “automatic and coordinated use of fake or hijacked accounts” can amplify the scope of Beijing’s disinformation.
The efforts of the communist regime in the area are not limited to the pandemic and affect a number of issues deemed thorny for the image of China.
The treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang – denounced as genocide by many international human rights organizations – as well as the protests in recent years in Hong Kong have been the subject of major campaigns.
In 2019, Twitter executives announced that they had taken down tens of thousands of accounts that served to amplify the online reach of messages relayed by bogus news agencies accusing Western countries of being behind the news. uprising in the former colony.
The scheme is not unique to China since the company has also withdrawn in recent years thousands of accounts linked to Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, causing the Washington post that online disinformation campaigns have become a “global plague”.