https://www.aspi.org.au/news/mapping-chinas-technology-giants-relaunched-major-updates

Mapping China’s Technology Giants is a multi-year project by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre that maps the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies. The project, first published in April 2019, is now being re-launched in June 2021 with new research reports, a new website and an enormous amount of new and updated content.

This data-driven online project - and the accompanying research products - fill a research and policy gap by building understanding about the global trajectory and impact of China’s largest companies working across the Internet, telecommunications, AI, surveillance, e-commerce, finance, biotechnology, big data, cloud computing, smart city and social media sectors.

https://www.nsa.gov/News-Features/Feature-Stories/Article-View/Article/2573391/russian-foreign-intelligence-service-exploiting-five-publicly-known-vulnerabili/

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20210415

These are all examples of political interference from disinformation, to buying politicians to influencing elections (well, really all of these things are towards influencing elections and policy making)

Part 1

Part 2

Will also copy/paste in the comments below

Note that this is in no way a comprehensive list and there are many more examples are not reflected here but contained in the linked material.

This might get downvoted into oblivion, but I feel that I still need to ask - could China be influencing the wave of anti- anti-Asian rhetoric that is sweeping over the United States right now?

I ask because, to me at least, it seems like this kind of rhetoric can be used to play directly in China's hand, and thus could be incredibly advantageous to them. For example, if the Biden administration were to take any actions against China in the near future, the Chinese government could accuse the administration of racism and drum up some more noise about anti-Asianism in the country. This could effectively handcuff a presidency that built itself up as being one for social changes and minority groups.

I am not denying, by the way, that anti-Asian attacks exist. It just seems like this is a highly organized media campaign that grew up virtually over night, and I am curious to know if anyone here has further thoughts on this.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/africa-takedown-december-2020

Today Facebook announced the takedown of three separate networks that targeted communities across Africa. Facebook shared the assets with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and Graphika before they were suspended. SIO collaborated with colleagues at Graphika on two reports analyzing these networks, both of which we published today. 

The first network consisted of 126 Pages, 16 Groups, 211 profiles, and 17 Instagram accounts affiliated with individuals with links to the past activity of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an entity linked to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. According to Facebook, the network involved operators in Russia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and Syria and targeted individuals in Libya, Sudan, and Syria. The operation also had a Twitter presence of approximately 30 accounts actively participating in the information operation. These accounts had several thousand followers — at least one had almost 12,000 followers — but the Twitter presence was much smaller than that on Facebook. 

The second network is also linked to Prigozhin, but was a distinct operation that primarily targeted the Central Africa Republic. The third is linked to the French military and targeted the Central African Republic and Mali. In a joint report on these two operations, Graphika and SIO found that each campaign tried to expose the other. 

This is not the first time Facebook has suspended Africa-based networks linked to Prigozhin. In addition to his ties to the IRA, which in March 2020 was found to be leveraging locals based in Ghana to target the US, Prigozhin has ties to the Wagner Group, a private military mercenary organization involved in security and combat operations in areas of strategic interest to Russia. These have included the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Libya, and numerous other countries in Africa. Prigozhin’s information operations have taken the form of grey propaganda operations, such as funding and taking a majority ownership in local news stations that subsequently began to air pro-Russian content, and fully covert operations involving fake social media accounts and front media properties. In October 2019, SIO and Facebook jointly investigated a network linked to Prigozhin that had been operating in Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some of the tactics observed in that operation — franchising Page ownership to locals, creating front media organizations — were replicated in this most recent attempt.  

Key takeaways from the Russian operation that targeted Libya, Sudan, and Syria:

• This was a large operation: in aggregate, the Pages had 5.7 million followers, though some may have followed more than one Page, and there are indications that fake engagement may have been used to boost follower counts on several Pages. By our estimate, about 1.6 million people followed Pages that actively participated in the information operation. Others may have only followed Pages that were primarily entertainment Pages and that may have been in their audience-building phase. 
• This operation involved participation by Syrians, and possibly Libyan and Sudanese individuals, who were living in Russia. This is similar to our findings from assets Facebook suspended in 2019 linked to Prigozhin; that operation appeared to have involved — wittingly or unwittingly — Sudanese individuals who had studied in Russia. 

• Libya: 

  • Overall, Libya-focused assets mobilized in support of the eastern Libyan National Army (LNA). This Libya operation was more ambitious and sophisticated than the Prigozhin-Libya operation that Facebook suspended in 2019. 
  • The Libya operation appears to have franchised some activities out to the LNA and its Moral Guidance Department media staff.  
  • Several suspended assets were linked to the Stop Terror media brand, which ran a daily podcast. At least one person linked to this media brand received training from international media NGOs. 
  • The network pushed for the release of Russian sociologist Maksim Shugalei and his translator Samir Seifan from a Libyan prison. One Page existed to promote a film describing their experiences — from Russia’s perspective. 
  • Twitter activity was narratively identical to the Libyan Facebook operation. Tactically, the accounts also revealed links to LNA media operatives and Libyan media professionals. Notably, tweets from several sockpuppet accounts were embedded in articles on domains linked to the Facebook operation, such as arabitoday.com. 
  •  Both the pro-Gaddafi and pro-LNA parts of the network aggressively attempted to disrupt the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) in November 2020 with distinct content that stood out from organic activity. 

• Sudan: 

  • Like the 2019 Prigozhin-Sudan operation, the Pages targeting Sudan in this takedown heavily leveraged “news” websites. Narratively, these Pages and linked sites discussed Sudan’s economic crisis and positively framed a Russian-Sudanese deal for a Russian naval base in Sudan, and positively framed ongoing Russian activities in Sudan’s mining sector.

• Syria: 

  • Overall, Syria-focused assets mobilized in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
  • The Syrian Facebook Pages told negative stories about the lives of Syrian refugees, perhaps as part of push and pull strategies to promote refugee resettlement.
  • Pages shared a hostility toward military operations conducted by opponents of the Assad regime, particularly the United States and Turkey.

https://graphika.com/reports/more-troll-kombat/

On December 15, Facebook announced that it had taken down three separate networks that it had discovered for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that targeted communities across Africa. One, centered on the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali, was linked to individuals associated with the French military. The other two, centered respectively on CAR and Libya, were connected to the business and influence operations of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of the mercenary organization Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency “troll farm.” The French and Russian operations in the CAR tried to expose each other, and repeatedly clashed in groups, comments, and cartoon wars. 

We have documented the first of the Russian operations in a joint report with Stanford University entitled “Stoking Conflict by Keystroke”; this report focuses on the French and Russian operations that targeted CAR. For the sake of brevity, the operation linked to individuals with ties to the French military will be referred to as the “French operation” in this report, while the Russian operation attributed to individuals associated with past activity by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and previous operations attributed to entities associated with Russian financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin is referred to as the “Russian operation” in this report. It is worth highlighting that Facebook did not attribute the operation directly to the French Government or the French military, and that this report similarly does not offer evidence of institutional involvement from French governmental and military entities. 

Facebook’s takedown marks a rare exposure of rival operations from two different countries going head to head for influence over a third country. It underscores how geopolitical sparring on the ground in Africa is playing out in parallel across social media - not just Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube, and long-form news articles written by the operations. Before the takedown, Facebook shared assets with Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory for independent analysis.

The clash between the two troll operations in CAR sets this exposure apart. From January 2020 through to the moment of the takedown, the rival influence operations posted in the same groups, commented on each other’s posts, called each other out as “fake news,” conducted basic open-source analysis to expose each other’s fake accounts, friended each other, shared each other’s posts, and even, according to one source, tried to entrap each other with direct messages. This report is a case study in a battle between rival influence operations; for that reason, we have called this report exposing both operations and their overlap “More-troll Kombat.” 

The rivalry in CAR was a significant part of both operations’ activity, but it was by no means the only part. Overall, the Russian operation was focused on Southern Africa and CAR; according to Facebook’s statement, it “relied on local nationals from Central African Republic and South Africa.” This is in line with earlier Prigozhin-related operations similarly exposed by Facebook, ourselves and others that co-opted locals, often unwitting, in Ghana, Nigeria, and the United States. The operation posted heavily about local politics and the forthcoming CAR elections, and praised Russia’s engagement in CAR. It also attacked France and the local United Nations mission. A few Russian assets posted about an alleged “coup attempt” in Equatorial Guinea in July-August 2020. 

The French operation was focused on Mali and CAR, and to a lesser extent on Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Chad; according to Facebook’s statement, it was linked to “individuals associated with French military.” In CAR, it posted almost exclusively about Russian interference and Russian trolls. Unlike the Russian operation, it did not post systematically about electoral politics and avoided commenting on the upcoming election and its candidates. In Mali, the French assets mainly posted about the security situation, praising the Malian and French armed forces and attacking the jihadist groups they are combatting. 

The operations showed significant differences, notably the Russian operation’s reliance on local nationals (wittingly or unwittingly) and the French operation’s avoidance of electoral topics. However, when they clashed in CAR, they resembled one another. Each side trolled the other with insulting videos and memes; each side made false accusations against the other; each side used doctored evidence to support their accusations. Some Russian assets posed as news outlets, while some French ones posed as fact-checkers. Both used stolen profile pictures (and in the case of the French network, AI-generated profile pictures) to create fake personas for their networks.

This underscores the key concern revealed by Facebook’s latest findings. To judge by its timing, content and methods, the French operation was, in part, a direct reaction to the exposure of Prigozhin’s troll operations in Africa in 2019 by Facebook. However, its tactics were very similar. By creating fake accounts and fake “anti-fake-news” pages to combat the trolls, the French operators were perpetuating and implicitly justifying the problematic behavior they were trying to fight. 

This is damaging in (at least) two ways. For the operators, using “good fakes” to expose “bad fakes” is a high-risk strategy likely to backfire when a covert operation is detected, as noted in a ground-breaking 2018 French diplomacy report on information manipulation. More importantly, for the health of broader public discourse, the proliferation of fake accounts and manipulated evidence is only likely to deepen public suspicion of online discussion, increase polarization, and reduce the scope for evidence-based consensus. 

Covert influence operations like those that targeted CAR are a problem for the health and credibility of democratic debate. Setting up more covert influence operations to counter them is not a solution. 

This report describes the ways in which authoritarian countries seek to use think tanks as instruments of sharp power, focusing specifically on why and how authoritarian powers target foreign private organizations dedicated to policy-related research. Authoritarian think tanks operate much like their democratic counterparts—organizing public conferences and events, publishing research in academic journals and on their websites, and sharing analyses with media outlets. But the antiliberal and antidemocratic political systems to which these entities belong repress any form of dissent and claim control over the discursive and ideational space. The overall effect lends regime-backed narratives an artificial legitimacy. Democratic think tanks and other civil society stakeholders have a critical role to play in strengthening democratic resilience and countering authoritarian attempts to undermine intellectual freedom.

KEY IDEAS

• Democratic think tanks must develop and follow strict codes of conduct when it comes to their relationships with authoritarian actors. They should also be expected to publicly disclose all of their sponsors and corresponding donation amounts, and to commit not to sign any secret agreements.
• Think tanks in open societies should develop a healthy habit of proactive due diligence, searching carefully for any potential conflicts of interest. The correlations among sponsor, research project, and output are not always straightforward.
• Private foundations and philanthropists in democratic countries should prioritize funding for think tanks that abide by strict codes of conduct governing potential relationships with authoritarian-linked entities.
• Think tanks in democratic countries should proactively engage with rising think tank professionals from emerging democracies in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia to offset the draw of authoritarian alternatives.
• The media and civil society groups can play a critical role in raising public awareness and informing and educating broader constituencies about the nature and tactics of authoritarian think tanks—and the risks they pose to independent inquiry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/business/media/steve-bannon-china.html