Hidden Chinese accounts masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic rifts and attacking President Biden ahead of the November election, according to researchers and administration officials.
The accounts signal a possible tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with a greater willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden.
In a wake of Russia’s influence campaign ahead of the 2016 election, China appears to be trying to exploit party divisions to undermine the policies of the Biden administration, despite recent efforts by the two countries to cool their relationship.
Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate die-hard Trump fans, including one on X who purported to be “father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way!!” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison uniform or suggested that Mr. Biden was a satanic pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that uncovered a small group of fake accounts posing as Trump supporters.
Ms. Thomas and other researchers have linked the new activity to a long-standing network of accounts linked to the Chinese government known as Spamouflage. Several of the accounts they described had previously posted pro-Beijing content in Mandarin — only to resurface in recent months under the guise of real Americans writing in English.
In a separate project, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization in Washington, identified 170 authentic Facebook pages and accounts that have also promoted anti-American messages, including pointed attacks on Mr. Biden.
The effort has more successfully attracted the attention of actual users and has become more difficult for investigators to identify than previous Chinese efforts to influence public opinion in the United States. Although researchers say the overall political slant of the campaign remains unclear, it has raised the possibility that China’s government is calculating that a second Trump presidency, despite his sometimes hostile remarks against the country, may be preferable to a second term Biden.
China’s activity has already raised alarms within the US government.
In February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that China was expanding its influence campaigns to “sow doubts about US leadership, undermine democracy and expand Beijing’s influence.” The report expressed concern that Beijing could use increasingly sophisticated methods to try to influence the US election “to sideline China’s critics”.
Ms. Thomas, who has studied China’s intelligence operations for years, said the new effort suggested a more nuanced and sophisticated approach than previous campaigns. It was the first time, he said, that he had encountered Chinese accounts that so convincingly portrayed Americans as supporting Trump while still managing to attract genuine engagement.
“The concern has always been, what if one day they wake up and they’re effective?” he said. “Potentially, this could be the start of them waking up and being effective.”
Online disinformation experts look to the months leading up to the November election with growing concern.
Intelligence estimates show that Russia is using increasingly subtle influence tactics on the United States to advance its case for isolationism as its war against Ukraine continues. News sites target Americans with Russian propaganda.
Efforts to counter false narratives and conspiracy theories—already a difficult undertaking—must now contend with weakening moderation efforts on social media platforms, political pushback, rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technology, and widespread information fatigue.
Until now, China’s efforts to push its ideology to the West have struggled to gain traction, first as it pushed its official propaganda about the superiority of its culture and economy, and later as it began to discredit democracy and stoke anti-American sentiment.
In the 2022 midterm elections, cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported that Dragonbridge, an influence campaign linked to China, tried to discourage Americans from voting while highlighting US political polarization. That campaign, which experimented with fake American personas posting content in the first person, was poorly executed and largely ignored online, researchers said.
Recent campaigns linked to China have sought to exploit divisions already evident in American politics, framing the divisive debate on issues such as gay rights, immigration and crime primarily from the right’s perspective.
In February, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a China-linked account on X calling itself a Western name along with a “MAGA 2024” report shared a video from RT, the Kremlin-controlled Russian television network, to claim that Mr. Biden and the Central Intelligence Agency had sent a neo-Nazi gangster to fight in Ukraine. (This narrative was debunked by the Bellingcat research team.)
The next day the post got a huge boost when Alex Jones, the podcaster known for spreading false claims and conspiracy theories, shared it on the platform with his 2.2 million followers.
The account with the reference “MAGA 2024” had taken steps to appear authentic, describing itself as being run by a 43-year-old Trump supporter in Los Angeles. But he used a profile photo lifted from a Dane’s travel blog, the institute’s report on the accounts said. Although the account was opened 14 years ago, its first publicly visible post was last April. In that post, the account tried, without evidence, to link Mr. Biden to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and registered sex offender.
At least four other similar accounts are also operating, Ms. Thomas said, all with ties to China. One account paid for a subscription to X, which offers perks like better promotion and a blue checkmark that was, before Elon Musk bought the platform, a verification mark given to users whose identity had been verified. Like the other accounts, it shared pro-Trump and anti-Biden claims, including the QAnon conspiracy theory and baseless allegations of voter fraud.
The posts included exhortations to “be strong, not defame China and create rumours”, uncomfortable phrases such as “how dare you?” instead of “how dare you?” and indicates that the user’s web browser was set to Mandarin.
One of the accounts appeared to slip in May when he replied to another post in Mandarin. Another posted mostly in Mandarin until last spring, when he went silent for a while before resurfacing with exclusively English content. The accounts denounced efforts by US lawmakers to ban the popular app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a form of “real authoritarianism” orchestrated by Israel and a tool for Mr Biden to undermine China.
The accounts sometimes amplified or repeated content from the Chinese influencer campaign Spamouflage, which was first identified in 2019 and linked to an arm of the Ministry of Public Security. He once posted content almost exclusively in Chinese to attack critics and protesters of the Communist Party in Hong Kong.
It has shifted in recent years to focus on the United States, portraying the country as engulfed in chaos. Until 2020, he posted in English and criticized American foreign policy, as well as domestic issues in the United States, including its response to Covid-19 and natural disasters such as the fires in Hawaii last year.
China, which has denied meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, now appears to be building a network of accounts across multiple platforms that will go live in November. “This is reminiscent of Russia’s style of operations, but the difference is more the intensity of this operation,” said Margot Fulde-Hardy, a former analyst at Viginum, the government agency in France that fights online disinformation.
In the past, multiple Spamouflage accounts followed each other, posted sloppily in multiple languages, and simultaneously surprised social media users with identical messages across multiple platforms.
Newer accounts are harder to find because they are trying to build an organic following and appear to be controlled by humans rather than automated bots. One of the accounts on X also had linked Instagram and Threads profiles, creating an appearance of authenticity.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Threads, last year removed thousands of inauthentic accounts linked to Spamouflage on Facebook and others on Instagram. He called a network that had pulled off “the largest known cross-platform influencer operation to date.” Hundreds of related accounts remained on other platforms, including TikTok, X, LiveJournal and Blogspot, Meta said.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has documented a new coordinated group of Chinese accounts linked to a Facebook page with 3,000 followers called War of Somethings. The report highlights the persistence of China’s efforts despite repeated attempts by Meta to take down Spamouflage accounts.
“What we’re seeing,” said Max Lesser, a senior analyst at the foundation, “is that the campaign continues, undeterred.”
