ARGUMENT: China’s influence campaignsHolding the Line: Chinese Cyber Influence Campaigns After the Pandemic
While the American public became more aware of Chinese cyber influence campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, they did not start there – and they will not end there, either. Maggie Baughman writes that as the world’s attention returns to the origins of the global pandemic and recommits to its containment, the United States must prepare for inevitable shifts in Chinese methods and goals in its cyber influence activities – “likely beyond what Western countries have previously experienced in dealing with China”
While the American public became more aware of Chinese cyber influence campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, they did not start there – and they will not end there, either. Maggie Baughman writes in Just Security that as the world’s attention returns to the origins of the global pandemic and recommits to its containment, the United States must prepare for inevitable shifts in Chinese methods and goals in its cyber influence activities – “likely beyond what Western countries have previously experienced in dealing with China. China’s attempts to shape the global narrative around the origins of the pandemic were, by most metrics, a failure.”
She adds:
But based on experience with other recent Chinese cyber influence campaigns, this failure will likely trigger a re-assessment and recalibration of overseas influence tactics in the coming months.
The United States – and the rest of the global community – should prepare for this shift by watching a context where it has happened before: Chinese cyber operations in Taiwan surrounding its 2020 elections. An analysis of that context can help us understand the extent of China’s capabilities and how influence trends change before and after major influence campaigns.
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Once these initial problems are addressed, the next step is to create a public, open source “case tracker” to track recurrences of the same false story or message in the database in an effort to map, trace, and eventually, contain the spread of individual propaganda “strains.” The final product should map instances of prominent false stories through news outlets, social media platforms, and websites to find the original propagator of the misinformation. This could look like an amalgamation of Twitter’s information manipulation project (which exposes “inauthentic influence campaigns”) and WeChatScope, a tracker of censored WeChat posts (albeit manual rather than automatic, given the limitations of LINE). And it would mimic the success of these two projects by harnessing crowd-sourcing, rather than scraping and mining algorithms. A critical aim of the case tracker would be to release open-source data on the “cases” and “strains” of propaganda, and publish user-generated models of the data – in essence, crowd-sourcing data analysis.
Given the massive global challenges facing the Biden administration, cyber influence operation trends abroad may seem like a lower priority. However, the Taiwan 2020 elections demonstrate that these operations will not stop after elections end – and China may pivot its tactics to account for failures or successes. The United States should support efforts like the one proposed here to combat cyber influence operations, and invest in countering disinformation before China’s most refined tactics are directed at the U.S. media environment.
