Truth DecayJabbed in the Back: Russian, Chinese COVID-19 Disinformation Campaigns
The public health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have also become a battle about the nature of truth itself. From the emergence of the first reports of a virus in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, opportunistic leaders in China, Russia, and elsewhere have used the virus as a pretext to further erode democracy and wage information warfare. They have inundated an already polluted information environment with disinformation and propaganda about the virus’s origins and cures, and, most recently, vaccines.
The public health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have also become a battle about the nature of truth itself. From the emergence of the first reports of a virus in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, opportunistic leaders in China, Russia, and elsewhere have used the virus as a pretext to further erode democracy and wage information warfare. They have inundated an already polluted information environment with disinformation and propaganda about the virus’s origins and cures, and, most recently, vaccines.
CEPA has just issued a report — Jabbed in the Back: Mapping Russian and Chinese Information Operations During COVID-19 – which traces and analyzes the COVID-related disinformation campaign conducted by Russia and China.
Here are the report’s Executive Summary, Introduction, and Lesson Learned sections:
Executive Summary
· During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spread disinformation about the efficacy of vaccines and the virus’s origins, a shift from Beijing’s previous disinformation campaigns, which had a narrower focus on China-specific issues such as Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
· Most of Beijing’s COVID-19 narratives aimed at shaping perceptions of China’s response to the pandemic and only rarely targeted other countries specifically.
· Russia recycled previous narratives and exacerbated tensions in Western society while attempting some propaganda about Russian scientific prowess.
· The Kremlin and the CCP learned from each other. While limited evidence exists of explicit cooperation, instances of narrative overlap and circular amplification of disinformation show that China is following a Russian playbook with Chinese characteristics. Russia is simultaneously learning from the Chinese approach.
· The largest difference between China’s and Russia’s information warfare tactics remains China’s insistence on narrative consistency, compared with Russia’s firehose of falsehoods strategy.1 Even with substantially greater resources, this largely prevents Chinese narratives from swaying public opinion or polarizing societies.
The two authoritarian countries’ information operations have evolved over the last 18 months and will continue to do so with the spread of variants, vaccines, and inquiries into the virus’s origins.
