According to a new investigation, China has conducted an extensive COVID-19 disinformation campaign through news and social media aimed at promoting a conspiracy theory that the US created and released the contamination as a bioweapon.
A nine-month investigation published by the Associated Press on Monday sets out how the communist government spread the malicious lie like a virus in its own right.
On January 26, 2020 – less than a week after the first case of the coronavirus was diagnosed on American soil – a man from China’s autonomous region of Inner Mongolia posted a video in the Chinese app Kuaishou claiming that the then new virus was designed was through according to the study.
The video was deleted and its creator arrested, detained for 10 days and fined for spreading the fake story.
But within weeks, the same theory was advanced by Chinese diplomats around the world, as well as the vast web of state-run media at home.
The wrong indication came when China came under scrutiny due to the early handling of the coronavirus – which escaped the country’s quarantine and became international – and before a similar theory that the outbreak originated in a Chinese laboratory , which has since been considered “extremely unlikely”. by international health experts.
On February 22, the People’s Daily – a newspaper distributed internationally as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party – fired back and reportedly based on speculation that the U.S. military had introduced the coronavirus to China, according to the AP report.
This report not only resonated at home, but also gained worldwide traction and appeared in inserts in the New Zealand Herald and the Helsinki Times in Finland.
On March 9, an essay alleging that the U.S. military created the virus in a laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and released it during the Military World Games athletics competition – in October 2019 in Wuhan, China, from which the virus originated. WeChat, another Chinese social media platform.
The next day, an anonymous online request was submitted to the White House website “We the People”, which, according to the AP, demanded that the U.S. government respond to the Fort Detrick theory.
Although the petition received less than 2 percent of the 100,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House, the fact that it was filed was extensively discussed in Chinese media.
Days later, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, unleashed a flurry of tweets that reinforced the bizarre theory in the essay.
“When did patient zero start in the US?” Zhao wrote to his hundreds of thousands of followers. ‘How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It could be the U.S. military that brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make your data public! US debt [sic] us an explanation! ”
According to the AP, Twitter later slammed the message with a fact-checking alert – but only in English, leaving the Mandarin version of the tweet untouched.
The 11 tweets Zhao fired over March 12 and 13 were quoted more than 99,000 times in at least 54 languages, according to the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which partnered with the AP for the investigation. .
According to the AP, the accounts referring to these tweets have nearly 275 million followers, indicating that the amount almost certainly contains some overlap.
Ironically, tweets that are critical of Zhao’s conspiracy theory – like broad figures from Donald Trump Jr. – the premise for the widest audience, the AP noted.
Dozens of accounts linked to Chinese diplomats, based in countries from France to Panama, also reflected the theory and exposed European and Latin American audiences to the conspiracy.
Accounts linked to the royal family of Saudi Arabia also gave the hoax weight, as did the state-run media in Russia and Iran, the investigation found.
The spread created a self-feeding cycle, where leaders in Russia and Iran weighed on the conspiracy created by China, received news in China, which further fueled speculation.
“Did the US government deliberately hide the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” was the leading question published in an open on March 22, published by China Radio International. “Why was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, closed in July 2019?”
Within days, the piece was reprinted more than 350 times around the world, mainly in Chinese, but also in English, Arabic, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the AP.
Accounts promoting the various media platforms reach 817 million followers, a total, almost certain that it contains some redundant accounts, an audit has found.
The conspiracy of Fort Detrick has never died in full since he was raised by Zhao during the summer, and last month by a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, who pushed back against further proposals from the then Trump administration. what the virus could have. escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
‘I want to emphasize that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological laboratory in Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues such as its 200-plus overseas bio-laboratories, and invite WHO experts to originate. track the United States, ”spokesman Hua Chunying said during a January 18 press conference that went viral in China.
In a statement to the AP, the ministry insisted that China was within its rights to defend itself against conspiracy theories, and was committed to setting the record.
“All parties should definitely say no to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said. “In light of the trump charges, it is justified and appropriate to dispel lies and clear up rumors by setting out the facts.”