The New Propaganda War | Why Are More Chinese Migrants Arriving at the U.S. Southern Border? | Apple’s iPhone Spyware Problem, and more

Here is the difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.
Given that both Russian and Chinese actors now blend in so easily with the MAGA messaging operation, it is hardly surprising that the American government has difficulty responding to the newly interlinked autocratic propaganda network. 
X (formerly Twitter) also used to look for foreign propaganda activity, but under the ownership of Elon Musk, that voluntary effort has been badly weakened. The new blue-check “verification” process allows users—including anonymous, pro-Russian users—to pay to have their posts amplified; the old “safety team” no longer exists. The result: After the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine last summer, a major environmental and humanitarian disaster caused by Russian bombing over many weeks, the false narrative that Ukraine had destroyed it appeared hundreds of thousands of times on X. After the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, David Sacks, the former PayPal entrepreneur and a close associate of Musk’s, posted on X, with no evidence, that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” His completely unfounded post was viewed 2.5 million times. This spring, some Republican congressional leaders finally began speaking about the Russian propaganda that had “infected” their base and their colleagues. Most of that “Russian propaganda” is not coming from inside Russia.
In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. They created the Election Integrity Partnership.
The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.
These stories are symptomatic of a larger problem: Because the American extreme right and (more rarely) the extreme left benefit from the spread of antidemocratic narratives, they have an interest in silencing or hobbling any group that wants to stop, or even identify, foreign campaigns. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that “we are actually less prepared today than we were four years ago” for foreign attempts to influence the 2024 election. This is not only because authoritarian propaganda campaigns have become more sophisticated as they begin to use AI, or because “you obviously have a political environment here where there’s a lot more Americans who are more distrustful of all institutions.” It’s also because the lawsuits, threats, and smear tactics have chilled government, academic, and tech-company responses.
One could call this a secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.

Key January 6th Instigator, Nick Fuentes, Reinstatement on Twitter/X: The Implications  (Tom Joscelyn and Jacob Glick, Just Security)
On Thursday, Elon Musk vowed to reinstate the “X” account of Nick Fuentes, a notorious white nationalist, and has now made good on his promise.
Fuentes gained infamy when he attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and has compiled an extensive dossier of extremist activity since then. Fuentes’s “America First” movement, dubbed the “Groypers,” is built on racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny. Fuentes regularly makes news for his calls to upend American democracy with Christian Nationalist-fueled violence. But there is one aspect of Fuentes’s career that deserves ongoing scrutiny, especially as Donald Trump vies for the presidency once again: Fuentes incited people prior to and during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. And he used Twitter, now known as “X,” as well as other social media platforms, to do it. Now that Fuentes’s X account has been restored, will Musk allow him to do so once again?
We scrutinized Fuentes’s social media presence while working for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee’s findings can be found in Chapters 6 and 8 of its final report. Below is a summary, drawn in part from those chapters, as well as additional video footage, of the role Fuentes played as an instigator.

Why Are More Chinese Migrants Arriving at the U.S. Southern Border?  (James Palmer, Foreign Policy)
In an interview last month, former U.S. President Donald Trump said Chinese nationals arriving in the United States from its southern border were “probably building an army,” echoing language common among the U.S. right wing. Right-wing commentators have suggested that the increase in Chinese arrivals and asylum-seekers is a planned infiltration of “military-aged men” or spies.
This is fearmongering. Espionage depends on access, which Chinese graduates and tech workers have and asylum-seekers do not. Furthermore, migrants around the world tend to be younger men, especially those taking a physically grueling route such as the risky Darién Gap, which stretches across Columbia and Panama.
Yet the rise in Chinese migrants coming through the Darién Gap is a good example of how China’s large population means that even small shifts can have big impacts. Around 37,000 Chinese nationals were detained at the U.S.-Mexico border last year—around the same number of people as in a single large Beijing housing compound.
Other migrants may have evaded detection, but the data suggests that most Chinese arrivals seek to make affirmative asylum claims, immediately reporting to the authorities. Those numbers have grown exponentially, increasing nearly 10 times since 2022. So, what’s going on? There is no great Chinese exodus, but a few changes have made the Darién Gap route more attractive to migrants from China.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese emigration grew overall, rising from an average of 190,000 annual departures in the 2010s to 310,000 in 2021 and 2022. Leaving China is a tricky business, especially for ethnic minorities and persecuted groups. Chinese emigration figures are still low per capita. But the strong U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic makes the United States a more attractive destination for some Chinese migrants, especially low-wage workers.
China’s own weak recovery, combined with the damage of COVID-19 lockdowns, has also pushed outliers to take the risky route through the Darién Gap, such as once successful small-business owners. University graduates are showing up at the southern border for the first time amid limited prospects back home. Conversations I’ve had with Chinese American volunteers suggest that many of these arrivals are first-generation graduates from rural backgrounds.

The Alleged LockBit Ransomware Mastermind Has Been Identified  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
Law enforcement in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia today jointly named Russian national Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the alleged operator of the LockBitSupp handle and the organizational mastermind behind the notorious LockBit ransomware group, which has been on a multiyear hacking rampage exporting an estimated $500 million from its victims.
For years, the leader of LockBit has remained an enigma. Carefully hiding behind their online moniker, LockBitSupp has evaded identification and bragged that people wouldn’t be able to reveal their offline identity—even offering a $10 million reward for their real name.
Law enforcement’s linking of Khoroshev to LockBitSupp comes after police in the UK infiltrated the LockBit group’s systems and made several arrests—taking its servers offline, gathering the group’s internal communications, and putting a stop to LockBit’s hacking spree. The law enforcement takedown, dubbed Operation Cronos and led by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), has essentially neutralized the hacking group and sent ripples through the wider Russian cybercrime ecosystem.

Apple’s iPhone Spyware Problem Is Getting Worse. Here’s What You Should Know  (Kate O’Flaherty, Wired)
In April, Apple sent notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, warning them they’d been targeted with spyware. “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” the notification reads.
Users quickly took to social media sites including X, trying to work out what the notification meant. Many of those targeted were based in India, but others in Europe also reported receiving Apple’s warning.
Weeks later, little is still known about the latest iPhone attacks. Former smartphone giant Blackberry, now a security firm, has released research indicating they are linked to a Chinese spyware campaign dubbed “LightSpy,” but Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer says this is inaccurate, and researchers at security firm Huntress say the variant Blackberry analyzed was a macOS version, not iOS.