Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.
Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.
I’m not, but it’s something I’ve read about in the past and I listened to most of the Art Bell tape vault and he was always talking about HAM. I do have an interest in systems of censorship and censorship resistance, and geopolitics, decentralized systems and network security, so I suppose it all kind of falls into place once you start thinking about it and understanding it based on what we’ve already seen happen in other countries. Twitter was the driving platform behind the Arab Spring protests, for example, and IMO it was also a large part of the reason Occupy WallSt was able to be so quickly divided and squashed. And for the last ~decade we’ve seen the listed countries firewalling their citizens from accessing free content, while they ramp up the authoritarianism. Russia made sure it had local competitors and ways to cut itself off before it started the 2016 campaign.