China is conducting an extensive COVID-19 disinformation campaign through news and social media aimed at promoting a conspiracy theory that the US created and launched the contagion as a biological weapon, according to a new investigation.
A nine-month investigation published Monday by the Associated Press details how the communist government spread the malicious lie like a virus in itself.
On January 26, 2020 – less than a week after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed on US soil – a man from China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region posted a video in the Chinese application Kuaishou claiming that the new virus was then created by the US, according to the study.
The video was deleted, and its creator was arrested, detained for 10 days and fined for circulating the false narrative.
But in a matter of weeks, the same theory has been advanced by Chinese diplomats around the world, as well as by the vast network of home media.
The wrong direction came as China was under heavy scrutiny for the early treatment of coronavirus – which had escaped from the country’s quarantine and become international – and was facing a similar theory that the outbreak originated in a Chinese laboratory, which has since was considered “extremely unlikely” by international health experts.
On February 22, the Daily Daily – an internationally circulated newspaper serving as a spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party – pulled back, airing a report based on speculation that the US military had introduced the coronavirus to China, according to the AP report.
This report not only resonated at home, but also gained global traction, appearing in advertisements in the New Zealand Herald and Helsinki Times in Finland.
On March 9, an essay claiming that the US military created the virus in a laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland and released it at the World Military Games athletics competition – held in October 2019 in Wuhan, China, from which the virus emerged – circulated on WeChat, another Chinese social networking platform.
The next day, an anonymous online petition was filed on the White House’s “We the People” website, asking the US government to respond to the Fort Detrick theory, according to the AP.
Although the petition garnered less than 2 percent of the 100,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House, the very fact that it was filed was widely covered in the Chinese media.
Days later, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, unleashed a wave of tweets amplifying the bizarre theory proposed in the essay.
“When did patient zero start in the US?” Zhao wrote to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It could be the US military that brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make your data public! The US owes [sic] an explanation for us! ”
Twitter later slammed the post with a fact-finding warning, according to the AP – but only in English, leaving the Mandarin version of the tweet untouched.
That said, the 11 tweets Zhao launched on March 12 and 13 were quoted more than 99,000 times in at least 54 languages over the next six weeks, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory. collaborated with AP for investigation.
In turn, the accounts that referred to these tweets have almost 275 million followers, according to the AP, which notes that this amount almost certainly includes a certain degree of overlap.
Ironically, critical tweets of Zhao’s conspiracy theory – such as the Donald Trump Jr. sides – have spread the premise to a wider audience, the AP noted.
Dozens of accounts related to Chinese diplomats, based in countries from France to Panama, also echoed the theory, exposing the European and Latin American public to the conspiracy.
Accounts related to the Saudi royal family also made the mistake, as did state media in Russia and Iran, the investigation found.
The spread created a cycle of self-feeding, in which leaders in Russia and Iran, weighing the conspiracy created by China, broke the news back in China, further fueling speculation.
“Did the US government intentionally hide the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” was the main question in an article published by China Radio International on March 22. “Why was the US Army’s Institute for Infectious Diseases Medical Research in Ft. Was Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, closed in July 2019? ”
In a few days, that piece was reprinted more than 350 times around the globe, mainly in Chinese, but also in English, Arabic, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, according to AP.
Accounts promoting op-ed on various social platforms have reached a cumulative number of 817 million followers, a total, again, almost certain to include some redundant accounts, an audit found.
The Fort Detrick conspiracy has never fully died since then, being resurrected by Zhao in tweets over the summer and last month by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, pushing back against other suggestions from the Trump administration since then. exit, which could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
“I would like to emphasize that, if the United States truly respects the facts, it should open the Fort Detrick biological laboratory, provide more transparency to issues such as the more than 200 overseas biological laboratories, invite WHO experts to follow up. originated in the United States, ”spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference on January 18 that went viral in China.
In a statement to the PA, the ministry insisted that China has its rights to defend itself against conspiracy theories and was committed to setting the record.
“All parties should firmly say ‘no’ to the dissemination of misinformation,” the ministry said. “In the face of subordinate accusations, it is justified and fair to throw lies and clarify rumors by presenting the facts.”