It took just three months before the rumor that COVID-19 was designed as a bioweapon to spread from the edge of the Chinese internet and take root in the minds of millions of people.
By March 2020, the belief that the virus was man-made and possibly armed was widespread, several surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that one in three Americans believe the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory; one in four thought it was deliberately designed.
This chaos was, at least in part, fabricated.
FILE – On this Monday, February 24, 2020 file photo, Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaks during a daily briefing in the Foreign Ministry office in Beijing. Zhao has repeatedly suggested on Twitter that the coronavirus may have come from the U.S. military. (AP Photo / Andy Wong, file)
Powerful forces, from Beijing and Washington to Moscow and Tehran, have struggled to control the story of where the virus came from. Leading officials and related media in all four countries acted as super-distributors of disinformation and used their stature to sow doubt and strengthen political conspiracies that were already circulating. Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory found. The analysis is based on a review of millions of posts and articles on social media on Twitter, Facebook, UK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram and other platforms.
While the pandemic dominated the world, it was China – not Russia – that took the lead in spreading foreign disinformation about the origins of COVID-19.
Beijing has responded to weeks of fiery rhetoric from prominent U.S. Republicans, including then-President Donald Trump, who wanted to label COVID-19 as “the China virus.”
CORONAVIRUS IN THE US: STATE-BY-STATE DISTRIBUTION
According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Beijing has worked to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces seeking to politicize the pandemic.
“All parties should definitely say ‘no’ to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement to AP, adding: “In light of the troop charges, it is justified and appropriate to cover up lies and spread rumors. already set out by the facts. ‘
The day after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fired a series of late-tweets that marked the first true global digital experiment with the party launched. overt disinformation.
L FER – In this file photo from February 7, 2020, people wearing masks are attending a vigil for Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, in Hong Kong. The outburst of sadness and anger unleashed by Li’s death was an unusual – and for the Chinese Communist Party, disturbing – display in China’s tightly monitored civilian space. (AP Photo / Kin Cheung, file)
Chinese diplomats have only recently mobilized on Western social media platforms, more than tripling their Twitter accounts and more than doubling their Facebook accounts since late 2019. Both platforms are banned in China.
“When did patient zero start in the US?” Zhao tweeted on March 12. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? Maybe it’s the US military that brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make your data public! US owes us an explanation!”
What happened next shows the power of China’s global messaging machine.
MIKE POMPEO TURNS TO ‘CONFRONT CHINA HEAD-ON’ LIKE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
On Twitter alone, Zhao’s aggressive spray of 11 tweets on March 12 and 13 was quoted more than 99,000 times over the next six weeks, in at least 54 languages, according to the DFRLab analysis. The accounts he referred to had nearly 275 million followers on Twitter – a number that almost certainly contained double followers and did not distinguish false accounts.
Influential conservatives on Twitter, including Donald Trump Jr., hammered Zhao and drove his tweets to their largest audiences.
China’s Global Times and at least 30 Chinese diplomatic accounts, from France to Panama, stormed in to support Zhao. Venezuela’s foreign minister and RT’s correspondent in Caracas, as well as Saudi computers near the kingdom’s royal family, have also significantly expanded Zhao’s reach and introduced his ideas in Spanish and Arabic.
FILE – In this file photo from September 4, 2020, Russian citizen Igor Nikulin speaks at a news conference in Moscow, Russia. Nikulin claims that the US created the virus and used it to attack China. Nikulin says he is a former UN weapons inspector, but the man who would have been his boss said he had never heard of him. (AP Photo / Pavel Golovkin, file)
His accusations have been uncritically covered in Russian and Iranian state media and shot back by QAnon discussion boards. But its largest audience is by far in China itself – despite the fact that Twitter is banned there. Popular hashtags about his tweet storm have been viewed 314 million times on Chinese social media platform Weibo, which does not distinguish any unique view.
On the night of March 13, Zhao posted a message of gratitude on his personal Weibo: “Thank you for your support to me, let’s work hard for the motherland 💪!”
China relies on Russia’s strategy and infrastructure for disinformation and is turning to an established network of Kremlin proxies for seeds and message distribution. In January, the Russian state media was the first to legitimize the theory that the US was designing the virus as a weapon. Russian politicians soon joined the chorus.
UK OPEN QUARANTINE HOTELS, press with vaccine drive
“The one reinforces the other … How much it is controlled by the commando, how opportunistic it was, was hard to see,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, in Riga, Latvia. .
Iran also jumped in. The same day that Zhao tweeted that the virus may have come from the US military, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, announced that COVID-19 could be the result of a biological attack. He would later mention the conspiracy to justify the refusal of US aid to COVID-19
Ten days after Zhao’s first conspiracy tweets, China’s global state media apparatus began.
“Did the US government deliberately hide the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” asks for a suggestive open in Mandarin published on March 22 by China Radio International. “Why was the U.S. Army Medical Institute for Infectious Diseases in Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical test base, closed in July 2019?”
FILE – In this file from March 11, 2020, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party, speaks during a session in the State Duma, the Second House of the Russian Parliament in Moscow, Russia. Zhirinovsky, the nationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, suggested that the US and its greedy pharmaceutical companies were to blame for the coronavirus. (AP Photo / Pavel Golovkin)
AP has appeared more than 350 times in Chinese state stores in a few days, mostly in Mandarin, but also worldwide in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic.
The Chinese embassy in France promoted the story on Twitter and Facebook. It appears on YouTube, Weibo, WeChat and a number of Chinese video platforms, including Haokan, Xigua, Baijiahao, Bilibili, iQIYI, Kuaishou and Youku. A seven-second version driven on music appears on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
“Expressing these kinds of conspiracy theories, disinformation, clearly, usually has no negative consequences for them,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow in the German Marshall Fund’s Asia program.
UK CORONAVIRUS VARIANT THAT COULD BE DEADLY IN OURSELVES, S SC SCIENTISTS
In April, Russia and Iran largely abandoned the conspiracy of bio-weapons in their open messages.
China, however, persisted.
While a World Health Organization team broke records in China in January to try to determine the source of the virus, MOFA spokeswoman Hua Chunying urged the US to ‘open up the biological laboratory in Fort Detrick’s to provide more transparency. on issues such as the 200+ overseas bio-laboratories, WHO experts invite to trace origin in the United States. ‘
Her remarks went viral in China.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the AP that it strongly opposes the spread of conspiracy theories. “We have not done this before and will not do so in the future,” the ministry said in a statement. “False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and dissemination of false information.”