E’s Substack
Jun 19
Recommend a serious review of a Twitter analysis from 2020 on the (in)effectiveness of China’s “official’ on-line advocacy operations in the 2016-2020 period - the title says it all; “China's Hopeless Twitter Influence Operations” - 🔺 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinas-hopeless-twitter-influence?utm_medium=email By Jordan Schneider, Oct 29, 2020.
I only came across this on substack last week, but it so closely echoed my own views of what was occurring in Canada & what I had been observing/saying/writing since 2011. it reinforces my dismissive assessments in 2017 & again 3+ years ago, when CSIS agents starting leaking 5Is material to Robert Fife & other journalists - with a pretty clear agenda of influencing public perception of foreign interference in Canada’s political process, especially in our 2019 election. 5 years on, these foreign-influenced actions generally appear in rear view mirror as even more mis-guided & ham-handed, thus undermining any possible positive impact due to Chinese cultural biases underlying the operational deployment of PRC advocacy activities. In this case of Chinese government activities, there was little improvement from the insensitive governance choices of Confucius Institutes across the country post-2000, which has seen most close down long since. The Indian assassination merely suggests an Asian consensus may be emerging, which regretfully is not in Canada’s long term interests. A serious public discussion of this is long overdue….
I recommend a close read of the detailed Twitter analysis - it should allay the concerns of concerned observers about the “impact” of Chinese influence, as compared to Russians, US, or Israel. A few excerpts to underline the current political furor needs to look more carefully at the real outputs & their impact on readers - & the likely (non) impact on most of Canadian polity. Personally, have long supported a foreign agent registry (since early in Howie Wilson’s position as Ethics Advisor, he looked at Taiwanese model legislation in 1997) to deploy capacity in Canada to oversee, assess & report on ongoing, deliberate interference operations by foreign players - especially by establishing a foreign agents registry to ensure transparency & accountability, with clear operational guidelines; & arguably most importantly, to include elephants in our room, Israelis & various US sources of funds, disinfo & influence peddling & Canadian organizations & vectors using these funds & material without domestic awareness, nor accountability
Twitter analysis was good, & relevant - but only in providing metrics on how irrelevant & hopeless Chinese advocacy actions were - to paraphrase Napoleon’s insightful question, “when your opponent is doing their utmost to harm their opportunities; why ever would you stop them from continuing❓”🤷🏻♂️…. That any Canadian party is giving credence to this inept effort is a sad commentary on competence or weakness of internal capacity, & perhaps of our security services nowadays; but worse - to waste so much time on such inept advocacy efforts, which impress few; and quickly turn off any knowledgeable reader/listener — clearly evidenced by fact less than 100 tweets had more than 10 retweets - I guarantee Canadian only figures were LESS❗️ A few examples to underline the ineptness of the Chinese “effort’:
🔺”Chinese; Unlike English tweets, which frequently post spammy things that have nothing to do with politics, found very little in Chinese corpus that isn't railing on re Taiwan, Hong Kong, COVID or Guo Wengui. As a non-native speaker, I'll defer to ASPI 7 Stanford's analysis on analyzing linguistic subtleties. One of their more interesting findings was how lots of the Cantonese writing seemed created through translation software, which goes to show just how half-baked this entire effort was.— This operation went out of its way to hire English speakers but couldn’t bother finding a handful of the sixty million Cantonese speakers on the mainland❗️”
🔺”I feel for whomever is the underpaid employee working on these English language tweets.” These workers probably did not expect when they were studying hard on English for their GaoKao; that they'd one day end up using their hard-earned skills not to travel the world & read Shakespeare; but write tweets for a totally ineffective information operations effort. I hope that they could convince their bosses that reading Charlotte Bronte & watching American reality tv while on the clock, was indeed work-appropriate.” [now that is insightful🤣❗️]
🔺This graph really doesn’t do the ineptitude justice. Says Amal Sinha, “Out of 350K tweets, 98.22% had no retweets & no likes. Plus less than 100 tweets have >10 retweets.” [How sad 😢; not only inept, but nobody cares❗️]
🔺 * “Compared to what Russia has shown itself capable to generate, Chinese efforts are amateur hour. Vast majority of tweets generate zero engagement in form of likes or retweets, much less retweets from President, his press people or his children. As evidenced by size of accounts that were banned in June 2020, as compared to those the year prior, it seems Twitter has gotten savvier at spotting accounts earlier & has effectively neutered Chinese network's potential influence”. 🔺[really need to reach out & thank Twitter for their analysis 🧐❗️ Regretfully, Musk takeover has turned Twitter into an X sewer, no longer capable/willing of such insightful analysis]
🔺 “Even with all those followers, no-one read their tweets. In the chart below, all the splotches above 2000 likes represent individual tweets, meaning that out of the million plus tweets there were only 250 that had more than 2000 likes. Every tweet over 1000 likes in 2019 was promoting p*rn.”(😝❗️)
🔺 “Over the past two years Twitter's Public Safety team has been releasing caches of accounts it believes to be part of state-backed information operations. Australian think tank ASPI (2020, 2019), Stanford's Cyber Observatory Center (2020) and startup Graphika (2020, 2019) have done admirable jobs analyzing the Chinese government's handiwork.”
🔺 Schneider’s “My conclusions* in brief: “China has no idea how to run a Twitter network, nor does its agents do a good job amplifying its message, with insincere state-run accounts. The content it puts out is too hidebound by prescribed talking points & suffers greatly from a general lack of understanding about how to operate in foreign cultural environments. Using purchased accounts with large follower counts whose followers couldn’t care less about politics, much less speak Chinese or English, is the Chinese operation’s most commonly used, but least successful tactic.
New strategies like paying YouTubers and technology like GPT3, however, could potentially change the game. However, unless the Chinese operators get comfortable with letting these accounts run free, these tacks are unlikely to have much success either.”
🔺* “The first thing that immediately stands out is the lack of 网感, 'feel for the internet', of the Chinese government's covert tweets. To set the standard, let's first take a look at Russia's IRA, the 'industry leader' in the space. As ASPI writes: <‘The Russian effort displayed well-planned coordination. Analysis of IRA account data has shown that networks of influence activity cluster around identity or issue-based online communities. IRA accounts disseminated messaging that inflamed both sides of the debates around controversial issues in order to further the divide between protagonist communities. High-value and long-running personas cultivated influence within US political discourse. These accounts were retweeted by political figures, and quoted by media outlets’>…..”
🔺Somehow Canada's many investigations into to foreign influence operations didn't catch this…. “Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers and Progressives With Gaza War Influence Campaign - National Security & Cyber” - Haaretz.com. 🔺https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-06-05/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israel-secretly-targeted-american-lawmakers-with-gaza-war-influence-campaign/0000018f-e7c8-d11f-a5cf-e7cb62af0000
🔺 Alternate: https://archive.is/sbAPI
🔺The investigative report: https://fakereporter.net/pdf/pro-Israeli_influence_network-new_findings-0624.pdf?v=3. From Haaretz: "The Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at Black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada. The operation, whose existence was first reported by Haaretz in March, was launched after the start of the war in Gaza and was intended to sway certain segments of public opinion on Israel's conduct.”
The influence campaign made extensive use of fake websites & social media to promote content that is pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim content, as well as disinformation about antisemitism on American campuses, according to an investigation by the Fake Reporter organization, published today. The operation was run by an Israeli company that specializes in political campaigns. According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party, for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis. Among the candidates for the job was the organization Voices of Israel, which received half of its original funding from the Israeli government. Asked for a response to this article, Voices of Israel denied that it was related to the influence campaign exposed.” No comments about Canadian targetting.
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