China seen as top foreign threat to 2024 U.S. election

FPI / September 19, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

While U.S. legacy media and Biden administration officials are caught in a Russia election interference time warp, former and independent intelligence analysts see China as the major external threat to the epochal 2024 U.S. showdown.

Chinese Communist Party-backed trolls are targeting U.S. voters by assuming fake identities of politically engaged voters on social media to promote divisive narratives around issues including gun control, abortion, racial inequality, and the Ukraine-Russia nd Israel-Hamas wars, according to new research.

Researchers attribute the trolling to a prolific influence network known as Spamouflage that has been previously linked to the communist government in Beijing.

“One of the world’s largest covert online influence operations, an operation run by Chinese state-linked actors, has become more aggressive in its efforts to infiltrate and sway U.S. political conversations ahead of the election,” said Jack Stubbs, chief intelligence officer at the research firm Graphika.

Stubbs cautioned that the cluster of accounts Graphika found is “one small sliver of this wider operation.” He noted a larger portion of the Spamouflage network is also targeting the U.S. using different types of accounts.

The army of trolls are deployed to undermine confidence in U.S. elections, the report said. The push has been somewhat agnostic on the candidates themselves, targeting former President Donald Trump and both Democratic presidential nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden before he exited the race.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found TikTok pushing thousands of videos with political lies and hyperbole to its users. One network of anti-Trump videos, generated with the help of artificial intelligence, was traced back to a complex web of overseas accounts appearing to operate in China, Nigeria, Iran, and Vietnam.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which has been criticized for targeting Trump with unprecedented lawfare, on Sept. 4 announced it was seizing 32 Internet domains "used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as 'Doppelganger.'" DOJ also announced criminal charges against two Russian media executives.

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