Chinese nationalist trolls have been posing as US supporters of former President Donald Trump on X in an attempt to exploit domestic divisions ahead of the US election, British researchers say.
A report released on April 1 by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, said it found four Mandarin-language Twitter accounts that had previously remained silent before resurfacing as U.S. Trump supporters.
It linked them to China’s so-called spam network, which it described as a “long-standing and widespread but largely ineffective” campaign to promote pro-Chinese Communist Party rhetoric.
But Elise Thomas, a senior fellow at the institute and author of the report, said pretending to be a Trump supporter is a new and more effective tactic.
“They are convincingly pretending to be Americans, specifically Trump supporters,” she told VOA. “They are getting engagement from real American users. This is consistent with what we have seen in the past with Spamouflage. Things are very different.”
She noted that traditional Spamouflage tweets may have a lot of likes and retweets, but upon further inspection, those tweets were from other Spamouflage accounts. Now, they mainly interact with real American users.
“What they’re doing that’s completely different from other Spamouflage accounts is they’re using something called the Patriot Follow Train to build a real audience, which is basically people agreeing to follow each other so that everyone builds their own of follower accounts,” Thomas explained.
These accounts use actual viral videos and photos to try to amplify divisive issues such as LGBTQ rights, immigration, race, gun control, and crime rates.
Some accounts mocked Biden’s age; others falsely claimed Biden was a pedophile. All seemed to be promoting Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again (MAGA),” leading reports to dub the new strategy “MAGAflage.”
One of the X accounts, Ben MAGA 2024, was opened in 2010, but previous posts have been deleted. Since April 18, 2023, the account began to tweet in English, with the theme: Biden is a pedophile and cannot be trusted.
The account attempts to create an image of an American living in Los Angeles. It posted a photo in January with the caption “Good morning! Patriots, I am 43 years old and passionately and loyally support President Trump!”
In fact, the photo belongs to a travel blog owned by a Danish man with no indication that he is a Trump supporter.
The account also retweeted a February 18 video from Russia’s state-run media outlet Russia Today, claiming that Biden and the CIA sent a neo-Nazi leader to fight in Ukraine.
The post was forwarded by American far-right conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones, who has 2.2 million followers on X. As of March 4, the post had been viewed nearly 360,000 times.
Thomas said that by fitting a topic into the framework of American partisan politics, they gained “a fair amount of engagement” from real American users.
This mimics Russia’s approach during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when U.S. officials said Moscow used information warfare to undermine the Clinton campaign, increase Trump’s chances and sow distrust in U.S. democracy, although the Kremlin denied this a little.
The report said some Spamouflage accounts may also be posing as left-wing Biden supporters, although they found none.
Twitter has since suspended all accounts named in the institute’s report.
While only a handful of accounts have been identified, the report says there are almost certainly many more, which Thomas fears could have unseen effects on the U.S. election.
“These [MAGAflage] Accounts are hard to find. It took quite a while, and I could only find relatively small amounts,” she said. “But because we know from the history of Spamouflage, everything it does is done on a large scale. If it works, they only do it on a small scale, which is really out of character for them. So I’m concerned that this may happen on a much larger scale. “
VOA contacted the Trump and Biden campaigns for comment but had not received a response as of press time.
The Spamouflage network was discovered in 2019 by social media analytics company Graphika and was initially used to target pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Researchers say the network is linked to “individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement” and is active on thousands of accounts and more than 50 platforms and forums, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X.
On March 11, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual assessment of major threats to U.S. interests around the world and warned that the Chinese government may “attempt to influence the U.S. 2024 election to some extent as it seeks to step aside.” “. Criticize China and amplify divisions in American society. “
Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement to VOA that China “abide by the principle of non-interference” and that claims that Beijing influenced the U.S. presidential election are “complete fabrications.”
Meta shut down nearly 9,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts, groups and pages associated with the Spamouflage network in August.
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