China used fake social media accounts to push Uyghur debate

A Chinese marketing firm hosted a ring of 72 fake news sites in 11 languages with corresponding fake social media personas that pushed Chinese government talking points, according to research published Thursday.

NBC News has looked at the English-language sites, which obscure their ownership and authors. Their articles criticized the U.S. and the West, but appeared to try to smooth over concerns in those countries, such as China limiting democracy in Hong Kong and putting ethnic minority Uyghur citizens in detention camps.

According to Mandiant, the sites were hosted on the internet infrastructure owned by a Chinese marketing company called Shanghai Haixun Technology.

It is not known who would have orchestrated the campaign, and neither a spokesman for China's embassy in Washington nor Shanghai Haixun Technology responded to requests for comment. The report adds to a growing list of examples of disinformation operations attributed to China, many of which have failed to gain much traction. Dakota Cary, a Chinese analyst at the Krebs-Stamos Group, said the ring of news sites appeared to be a clumsy attempt by a pro-China group to influence Western conversation.

The campaign observed by Mandiant is another example of how China is unable to influence cultural narratives with inauthentic accounts and forged documents, Cary said.

In at least one case, the campaign appeared to have leveraged forged letters to smear an anthropologist, Adrian Zenz, who has published significant research on China's treatment of Uyghurs.

The account was suspended, but Google still has a cached version of the account that is still visible.

The victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the Washington think tank that Zenz works for, is one of the three letters. The first, purportedly from the desk of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. thanks Zenz and appears to tie him to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, referred to simply as Bannon. The foundation paid Zenz more than half a million dollars for his research, and the other two appeared to be evidence of that.

Spokespeople for Rubio's office and the foundation confirmed to NBC News that the letters are fake. They were treated as authentic in several articles about Zenz in the news ring of Shanghai Haixun. China Daily, the country's primary state-sponsored English news outlet, also wrote an article treating them as authentic in May. The use of fake U.S. government letters and fake social media profiles is a result of a previous information operation that another cybersecurity firm, Recorded Future, has attributed to Russia. The forged letters appeared to erode support for NATO, the U.S. military alliance.

Zenz is a common target for Chinese officials. A year ago, the head of propaganda at the Chinese Communist Party Xu Guixiang held a news conference dedicated to discrediting him.

Zenz told NBC News that he is the most elaborate effort to date, despite the fact that he is used to getting criticism from China for his work.

Zenz said in a phone call that I've been subject to a lot of smear campaigns. This one seemed to be slightly more sophisticated because it tried to build a credible argument, using even fake documents, to build a narrative that some people could believe.