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From CNN Audio, this is The Assignment, I'm Addie Cornish. For the first time in more than.

Six.

Years.

Chinese President, Xi.

Jinping, will soon be in the United States. He's expected to meet with.

President Joe.

Biden this week on the... Whenever the leaders of the US and China get in a room together, it's going to be a big deal. That's especially true now as this key alliance tries to basically rekindle its coldest relations in decades. And despite the diplomacy and handshakes to come, CNN's Donio Sullivan reports that the Chinese government is actually engaged in a massive disinformation effort and that it's affecting US citizens right here. So this is how Doni began his report last night on Aaron Burnett out front.

I feel really, really afraid. They use hateful words or threatening words.

They will make life very uncomfortable for those who speak ill of China.

They are here on American soil thousands of miles from Beijing, but still being hounded and harassed by the Chinese government.

We wanted to know a little bit more, so Doni is bringing his assignment to us. Welcome to the show, Donny.

Thank you, Ari.

I want to get into the details of what we just heard, but first, I just need a tiny bit of a glossary. What is the difference between disinformation, misinformation? I feel like this stuff has gotten a little confusing in the last few years.

Right, yeah. So misinformation is, if you or I share a piece of false information that we don't know it's false, right? We're just passing it along. We're sharing conspiracy theory without really realizing that it is false. Disinformation is false information that has been created with the intention to deceive. So that can be a political campaign that is trying to push some lie. Or as we've seen in this case, it can be a nation-state actor, a government that is trying to push false information or propaganda.

That's really important because I feel like after 2016, that was like a big wake-up call, and the focus was on Russia and its activities online.

Yeah, and the beat I work on at CNN, which is essentially covering this phenomena of mys and disinformation and online hate and deep fakes and bots and trolls, really all the fun stuff. That as a beat really emerged after 2016, which people might remember. That's when we had the Russian trolls, all this stuff came out that a pretty sophisticated effort on the part of the Russian government to set up fake groups on social media, fake Black Lives Matter groups, fake right-wing groups, all just trying to really trying to stoke division here. So all of that emerged since 2016, and since then, there's reporters like me, but also independent researchers and even at the companies themselves, like at Facebook, which is now called Meta, they have special teams in place who are trying to root out this thing.

So that brings us to China and what you found in your reporting. And one of the primary sources for your piece is actually a journalist, a staff writer at The New Yorker. She was born in China. She's lived in the US since she was a little girl. But she found herself essentially targeted online by the Chinese government. So first, give us a sense why.

Yes, so, G-Yong Fan is a reporter with The New Yorker. She is of Chinese descent. She's an American. She grew up here in the United States. She was covering pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong a few years ago. After that, she began getting just so many vile messages on social media attacking her, accusing her of being a traitor to China, all these various things.

Lots of us are more familiar with the idea that being targeted online for harassment can be overwhelming, can be scary. I can't imagine it happening with the support of a government. What was the volume of it? What was she dealing with?

Yeah, it was totally overwhelming. Basically, it was any time that she opened up her phone, any of her social media apps, there were all these extremely personal messages attacking her, attacking her family, threatening her, telling her she should die. One researcher we spoke to looked at just a hashtag that called her a traitor, and it had been shared more than 10,000 times. There was more than 10,000 tweets just calling her a traitor. You know, again, I think people can say, Well, couldn't you ignore this or just move on? But I mean, if it's coming into your email and to every social media platform, also, if you're a journalist and you need to use these platforms to report, it's extremely difficult. Right.

And doxing, false identities, anybody who's ever had their identity messed with online or things like that, know how disruptive it can be. I'm wondering how much do we know the Chinese government is pouring into these kinds of efforts?

Yeah, so Xi Yang Fan always presumed and suspected that the Chinese government had some hand in this given just the volume and the sheer intensity of how much trolling and harassment was happening here. But it's really only been these past few months, thanks to a number of reports and also some indictments from the US Department of Justice, that the link has really been made clear here, specifically to police officers in China who are allegedly behind a lot of this campaign. In 2018, some researchers came across hundreds, thousands of accounts that were posting pro-China messages over and over and over again. They figured that all these accounts were working together, were being run by the same people. But they saw that the accounts were pretty spammy, that they weren't really getting much engagement, that they were just posting the same message over and over and over again. The guys decided to call it spam and camouflage in that they were trying to hide their links back to China, but not so well. So spammiflage was born.

One of the things I want to understand is what's the incentive for any government to do this? Is this just about China squashing dissent that happens beyond its shores? Is there something greater at stake? What's the incentive here?

Yeah, I think what we're seeing in this case and from talking to a lot of experts who've been monitoring this thing is, I mean, this is a way of extending that censorship, that control that China has within its own country, beyond its borders. And this spamofage campaign, which groups have been following for quite a few years, it has only been the past six months or so, where both Meta, who has big teams working on this, and also the Department of Justice, they were able to say, Spamofage, these accounts that experts have been tracking for years, tens of thousands of accounts? Yes, they are actually linked not only to the Chinese government, but specifically to police officers in China. A US federal indictment, which was released earlier this year, actually put faces to some of these trolls. In this case, the US government exposed, I think, 34 police officers in Beijing whose job it is, allegedly, to go into the office every day, clock in and clock out in central Beijing, not to patrol the streets, but to go troll. While this stuff might not be making headlines, it might not be necessarily changing geopolitics, this campaign is pretty effective at really intimidating and striking fear in people who live in the United States who might either be critical of China or be perceived by China as being critical of them.

We spoke to two Chinese dissidents who live here in the United States, both of whom are vocal opponents of the Chinese Communist Party, and they are essentially pro-democracy advocates, campaigners here now in the United States. But then also, of course, there was the journalist, Yee-Yong Fan, from The New Yorker who is not a dissident or campaigner or a protester. She's merely a journalist doing her job.

I'm talking with CNN's, Donnie O'Sullivan. We'll be back in a minute.

Here.

The latest.

Coverage of the.

Israel-hamas conflict on.

Cnn's Tug of War podcast. To what extent Israel is.

Responsible or Hamas is.

Responsible for the suffering of people on the ground. Cnn's Jeremy Diamond is in to rote Israel, near the border with.

Gaza, where fierce fighting is underway.

Israel is obviously going to be held to a higher standard. Israel is a self-proclaimed democracy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm back with CNN, Stony O'Sullivan, and he's here with a report about the world's largest-known online disinformation operation sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I want to talk about another Chinese dissident that you spoke to based in New York, Chen Poukang. And he actually encountered this during a Zoom meeting, of all things. But tell me a little bit about his dissident work and how he realized he was now a target.

Yeah, Chen Poukang has just a fascinating story. He was part of the broader student movement that emerged out of the Tiananman Square in the '80s. He spent five years in prison and in labor camps in China because of his pro-democracy work before he eventually came to the US. Since then, he's been here in New York City. He is a pro-democracy campaigner. He's an American citizen. And a lot of the work he's doing as a dissident here is speaking out and wants to tell the world what is happening in China and also wants to try and get the message back to people in China to try and spread the democracy message. So obviously as part of that, he organizes events for pro-democracy advocates in the United States. Obviously, during COVID, a lot of that stuff stopped. They eventually moved some meetings to Zoom. And in January 2021, so really at the height of COVID, Chen Po-Kong organized a pro-democracy China summit online on Zoom where he and other activists would meet and discuss these things. They started the Zoom call pretty soon after it began. People who were not invited to the event or who should not have been in the call basically crashed it and eventually they shut down the call.

It turns out the people who did that weren't just some anonymous trolls, weren't some teenagers in their bedroom. They, according to the US Department of Justice, were these Chinese police officers. And Chenpong-Kang said to us when he realized that and as we spoke to him, he said, That time I was myself, even shocked. I said, What? The CCP don't even allow us to have a meeting over this meeting. We are Chinese citizens, but we are also, like me, American citizen. So they attacked me, attack our meeting, means they attacked the United States. He was shocked. Even he, as somebody who had been incarcerated by China for his pro-democracy work, he was even shocked that, wow, the Chinese government is even trying to stop me, a US citizen in the United States from organizing an online meeting. I think that just really speaks to the level of just how far the tentacles of this campaign goes and the level of quashing of any dissent outside of Chinese borders that could be critical of the government.

The US State Department sees this as an issue beyond just what's happening with these dissidents. In September, they issued a report. It was called How the People's Republic of China seeks to reshape the global information environment. What did that report indicate that makes sense given your reporting now?

Yeah, so the State Department has a unit called the Global Engagement Center, and basically what it looks at is information operations outside of the US. In September, it released a pretty detailed report just outlining how vast China's efforts in terms of trying to improve its image or quash any criticisms of it have spread out across the world. There's these covert, semi-covert, trolling campaigns that seek to intimidate and threaten people. But then also there's a very big infrastructure of Chinese state media that now has many international outlets that are leveraging social media to really push their message there. And so what the State Department is saying is that basically China, through its media machine here, is trying to take away maybe the influence that the United States might have or to knock the United States off that pedestal.

It's interesting because we're in a moment where politically, especially I think, Republicans have talked really strongly about China and its influence. I think the biggest, most obvious fight to most people is over TikTok. But sometimes there is this accusation that they're going after China randomly. But it sounds like you're saying that there is truth to the idea that there is a threat in the online sphere anyway.

Yes, and I think two things can be true at once here. One is that there is a real threat and there is a lot of sophistication here on the part of the Chinese government in terms of trying to push and mold messaging, but also that calls from lawmakers in the US and around the world to crack down in China can sometimes be motivated by different factors, whether that be prejudice or anything else. But there certainly is a very sophisticated machine at work here like all these things, it is very difficult to quantify or to measure specifically how effective these things can be. Obviously, on the micro level, which is what we try to look at here with the people living in the United States, I mean, that is having a big toll on their personal lives. Some of them, they live in fear. In the case of J. Yung Fan, she essentially said that she just doesn't engage much on social media anymore, which again, as a journalist and as an American citizen, you're supposed to have that right to be able to engage in what is now the marketplace of ideas on the internet.

So essentially to be driven out of there because of harassment is a real attack on the Civil Liberties of an American.

It's also happening in this moment where, as we just talked about, there is an active conversation about China and US relations, and it's hard to see having that conversation or dialog when there's manipulation, right? How can you know what you're looking at is like a good faith critique or the work of meddling?

Yeah, that is actually the whole purpose of these campaigns, right? It is to muddy the waters in such a way that it's difficult to know where the truth begins and ends. We've seen that even domestically within the United States when it comes to people who are pushing election lies here. It's not necessarily always to convince people that the election is stolen. It's to create enough doubt in people's minds that it's difficult to know what to believe.

Which is pretty easy in an era when we're all pretty wobbly, frankly.

We are very wobbly.

All right, before I let you go, I want to ask you about this visit with President and President Biden in San Francisco. What are you going to be listening for coming out of that?

I mean, one thing that is also in our story that Darren Linville, who's a Media Forensics Professor at Clemson University, told us is, unlike Russia, China has always focused mostly in this information space on issues that are directly tied to China. Coming after the Chinese dissidents, it's coming after reporters who might report critically on China. It's swarming the mentions and comments of anybody who writes something negative about China. Russia, on the other hand, as we saw with 2016, they were more about stoking divisions within the US. Nobody even needed to mention Russia. They were just trying to stir the pot here. What experts have now told us is they believe that China seems to be experimenting and more just trying to push buttons in that US domestic space. So that is something I know that experts, I know that the social media platforms are watching very, very closely as we go into 2024.

Well, Donny, thanks so much for sharing your reporting. I hope you can come back, especially during the election.

Thank you, Audrey.

And you can check out Donnie's report. It's called China is Using the World's Largest Known Online Disinformation Operation to Harass Americans. Now, this episode of The Assignment, a production of CNN Audio, was produced by Dan Bloom. The senior producer of our show is Matt Martinez. Dan de Zula is our technical director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Licktye. As always, special thanks to Katie Hinnman. Thank you for listening. I'm Avi Cornish.