US media is reporting that through a combination of industrial scale and technological clout, China’s Communist Party is increasing the reach of its influence operations, surpassing even the Kremlin’s malign activities. According to a report in The Diplomat:
November 16, 2021 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long sought to influence the media and information spaces in other countries, deploying a diverse set of tools to achieve its aims. Yet for many years there was no significant evidence that China-linked actors were engaging in aggressive disinformation campaigns on global social media platforms like the one pursued by Moscow ahead of the 2016 U.S. elections. Since 2019, that picture has changed. Multiple investigations and large-scale takedowns of inauthentic accounts have demonstrated that pro-Beijing forces are indeed carrying out a broad range of manipulative activities on global social media platforms. Moreover, they are constantly adapting their tactics to maximize efficacy. A new set of investigations on the topic have been published over the past six months. Collectively, the findings point to an unparalleled scale of activity – surpassing even the Kremlin’s – with important implications for global search results, mobile phone users worldwide, and domestic politics in the United States and elsewhere.
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According to the report, China’s information manipulation activities have reached an unmatched scale, with China-linked producers constantly renewing the supply of content even as global platforms remove accounts and channels that are identified as inauthentic.