U.S. Accuses Foreign Actors of Inflaming Tensions over Floyd Killing

“Compared to newsrooms, it typically takes more time for agents of foreign influence operations to adjust to breaking news events,” he said.

The Justice Department did not respond to VOA’s requests for additional information, and the FBI declined to comment.

Seizing an Opportunity
Unless new evidence emerges, researchers like those at the Digital Forensic Research Lab argue it would seem U.S. adversaries are content, for the moment, to focus their efforts on making sure Floyd’s death and the protests keep trending on state-backed media websites and on social media.

According to an analysis by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based effort to document and expose “ongoing efforts to subvert democracy,” the hashtag #GeorgeFloyd was top among all Russian diplomatic and state-backed social media accounts from Friday to Sunday night.

“#GeorgeFloyd” was also the third most popular hashtag among Chinese diplomatic and state media accounts.

“We know that they are trying to take this opportunity to make comparisons to try to sow discord in the U.S.,” State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus told VOA on Thursday, when asked particularly about China’s efforts.

“We do know that we’re seeing them retweet things like RT, the Russian propaganda outlet,” she added. “And, we have talked about how we’ve seen a convergence between China, Russia and Iran spreading each other’s disinformation on Twitter, on Facebook, the internet.”

Global Politics
Some analysts warn that not all of that is necessarily aimed at sowing divisions within the U.S. Some of the coverage and propaganda about the protests, they say, has more to do with global politics.

“It has provided the opportunity for the United States’ adversaries around the world — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran — to weigh in, and weigh in in an ideological way in which they talk about the weaknesses of the U.S. system, the liberal democratic order,” Ken Gause, the director of adversary analytics at CNA, a Washington-based think tank, told VOA’s Korean service.

“It gives them a chance to really kind of push back,” he said.

Other analysts also caution that most of what they have seen so far does not fall into the category of disinformation.

“Some of it is definitely provocative and controversial, but it is not misleading or manipulated,” the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Bret Schafer told VOA.

And the disinformation ASD has seen, including a series of images circulated on Twitter this week purporting to show protesters in the U.S. asking for help from Beijing, do not appear to be part of any coordinated effort.

“To date, we’ve seen no evidence that this [the faked photos] has been orchestrated or amplified by state actors,” Schafer said.

Experts and officials also believe that much of the disinformation on social media right now is coming from U.S.-based groups and individuals.

Attempts to Further Divide a Nation
But experts note there is reason for concern, especially as adversaries like Russia and Iran have a history of seeking to exploit racial tensions in the U.S.

A 2019 report by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee found Russia’s best-known troll farm (people who post deliberately inflammatory or provocative comments), the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), heavily targeted African Americans in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African Americans,” it said. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016.”

In 2018, Facebook also took down dozens of accounts, pages and groups linked to Iran and seen as an effort to inflame racial divides ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Jeff Seldin is VOA news reporter. VOA State Department Correspondent Nike Ching and VOA Korean service reporter Eunjung Cho contributed to this report. This article  is published courtesy of the Voice of America  (VOA).