Chinese influence efforts expand

A wide-ranging pro-China influence group is attempting to use social media platforms and other forums to mobilize physical protests around COVID-19 concerns in the United States, research released Wednesday found.

Cybersecurity group Mandiant Threat Intelligence found evidence that the pro-People’s Republic of China group behind the protest efforts, first discovered in 2019, has expanded from using traditional social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to being found on 30 social media sites and 40 other websites and forums.

While Mandiant noted that no successful protests have been seen as a result of the efforts of the group’s call for physical protests, the group’s efforts have increased, with Mandiant finding evidence of the group posting in at least seven languages across the sites to get their messaging out.

“We have observed extensive promotion of Russian, German, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese-language content on U.S. and non-U.S.-based platforms, in addition to the typical English and Chinese-language activity that has been widely reported on,” the Mandiant researchers wrote in the blog post detailing their findings. “This represents a significant development in our collective understanding of this pro-PRC activity set.”