A network of 123 Chinese websites are reportedly posing as local news outlets in 30 countries and driving “pro-Beijing disinformation” and “ad hominem attacks” as part of an “influence” campaign linked to a Beijing-based public relations firm, said a report by research group Citizen Lab.
However, a spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, according to Reuters, said that it was a “typical bias and double standard to allege that the pro-China contents and reports are disinformation, and to call the anti-China ones true information”.
According to Citizen Lab, these websites operate in Europe, Asia and Latin America, but from within China. It attributed the PR campaign to Shenzhen Haimaiyunxiang Media aka Haimai.
The Toronto-based group said the propaganda content appeared with news aggregated from local news outlets and Chinese state media. The targeted content included press releases and politically-themed conspiracy theories, aiming “at the image of the US and its allies”.
These websites, as per the report, “enjoyed negligible exposure” but carried “heightened risk of inadvertent amplification” in local languages.
Citizen Lab said it began the investigation in 2020 and initially found a series of such websites in Italy and South Korea. One of them, it said, was Roma Journal, which looks like a local Italian news outlet but is operated from China and is “interspersed with a relatively high amount of news related to China, or even directly derived from Chinese news organisations”.
Moreover, the “press releases” section on the website leads to articles on subjects such as China's contribution to the global economic recovery and technological innovation.
This report was published with AI assistance.
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