Comment: Although the following report comes from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, it's based on a US Associated Press investigation, in collaboration with arguably the leading Western imperial think-tank, The Atlantic Council.

Let's see where it goes wrong...


China played leading role in spreading Covid-19 conspiracies, investigation finds
china usa covid-19
"You did it!" "No, YOU did it!"
It took just three months for the rumour that Covid-19 was engineered as a bioweapon to spread from the fringes of the Chinese internet and take root in millions of people's minds.

By March 2020, belief that the virus had been human-made and possibly weaponised was widespread, multiple surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that one in three Americans believed the new coronavirus had been created in a lab; one in four thought it had been engineered intentionally.


Comment: That's certainly what the evidence suggests: Compelling Evidence That SARS-CoV-2 Was Man-Made


This chaos was, at least in part, manufactured.

Powerful forces, from Beijing and Washington to Moscow and Tehran, have battled to control the narrative about where the virus came from.

Leading officials and allied media in all four countries functioned as super-spreaders of disinformation, using their stature to sow doubt and amplify politically expedient conspiracies already in circulation, a nine-month investigation of state-sponsored disinformation conducted in collaboration with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found.


Comment: With its HQ in Washington D.C., and its track record of pinning Western election and referendum results on the Russian govt, its findings are as reliable as Dr. Fauci's facemask recommendations.


The analysis was based on a review of millions of social media postings and articles on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram, and other platforms.

As the pandemic swept the world, it was China - not Russia - that took the lead in spreading foreign disinformation about Covid-19's origins.


Comment: With Trump labelling it 'the China virus', China had reason to present an alternative origin theory. US and UK intelligence services explicitly claimed that it leaked from the biolab in Wuhan. Then China published its Fort Detrick theory. Don't forget that, before accusations were traded, China's alarm at what it uncovered in Wuhan strongly speaks to their fear about the 'novel coronavirus' being man-made, thus unleashed on them by someone else.


China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Beijing has worked to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces seeking to politicise the pandemic.

"All parties should firmly say 'no' to the dissemination of disinformation," the ministry said in a statement, but added: "In the face of trumped-up charges, it is justified and proper to bust lies and clarify rumours by setting out the facts."


Comment: Indeed. China is entitled to a right to reply. Bear in mind Western media tends to be coordinated in its intercontinental Fake News efforts.


The day after the World Health Organization designated the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the ministry, shot off a series of late-night tweets that launched what may be the party's first truly global digital experiment with overt disinformation.

Chinese diplomats have only recently mobilised on Western social media platforms, more than tripling their Twitter accounts and more than doubling their Facebook accounts since late 2019. Both platforms are banned in China.

"When did patient zero begin in US?" Zhao tweeted on March 12. "How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe [sic] us an explanation!"


Comment: All valid questions.


What happened next showcases the power of China's global messaging machine.

On Twitter alone, Zhao's aggressive spray of 11 tweets on March 12 and 13 was cited over 99,000 times over the next six weeks, in at least 54 languages, according to analysis conducted by DFRLab.

The accounts that referenced him had nearly 275 million followers on Twitter - a number that almost certainly includes duplicate followers and does not distinguish fake accounts.

Influential conservatives on Twitter, including Donald Trump Jnr, hammered Zhao, propelling his tweets to their largest audiences.

China's Global Times and at least 30 Chinese diplomatic accounts, from France to Panama, rushed in to support Zhao. Venezuela's foreign minister and RT's correspondent in Caracas, as well as Saudi accounts close to the kingdom's royal family also significantly extended Zhao's reach, helping launch his ideas into Spanish and Arabic.


Comment: With all these players, this doesn't sound like a coordinated disinformation campaign, it's called 'going viral'... And, as every media marketer knows, it's very difficult to force something to go viral. It often happens because there's information there that people can relate to.


His accusations got uncritical treatment in Russian and Iranian state media and shot back through QAnon discussion boards. But his biggest audience, by far, lay within China itself - despite the fact that Twitter is banned there.

Popular hashtags about his tweetstorm were viewed 314 million times on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, which does not distinguish unique views.

Late on the night of March 13, Zhao posted a message of gratitude on his personal Weibo: "Thank you for your support to me, let us work hard for the motherland!", including an emoji of a flexed bicep.

China leaned on Russian disinformation strategies and infrastructure, turning to an established network of Kremlin proxies to seed and spread messaging. In January, Russian state media were the first to legitimise the theory that the US engineered the virus as a weapon. Russian politicians soon joined the chorus.

"One was amplifying the other ... How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell," said Janis Sarts, director of the Nato Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia.


Comment: It was hard to tell because it was likely, in large part, organic. The world has good reason to suspect US involvement, given its massive investment in an insidious biowarfare program:

Ethnic-Specific Weapons: Leaked Documents Reveal US Diplomats in Georgia Trafficking Human Blood And Pathogens For Pentagon Biowarfare Laboratory


Iran also jumped in. The same day Zhao tweeted that the virus might have come from the US army, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced Covid-19 could be the result of a biological attack. He would later cite that conspiracy to justify refusing Covid-19 aid from the US.

Ten days after Zhao's first conspiratorial tweets, China's global state media apparatus kicked in.

"Did the US government intentionally conceal the reality of Covid-19 with the flu?" asked a suggestive op-ed in Mandarin published by China Radio International on March 22. "Why was the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, shut down in July 2019?"


Comment: At least some countries are free enough to raise these extremely important questions: CDC suddenly shuts down US Army's Fort Detrick bioweapons lab due to 'lapses in safety'


Within days, versions of the piece appeared more than 350 times in Chinese state outlets, mostly in Mandarin, but also around the world in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic, AP found.

China's embassy in France promoted the story on Twitter and Facebook. It appeared on YouTube, Weibo, WeChat and a host of Chinese video platforms, including Haokan, Xigua, Baijiahao, Bilibili, IQIYI, Kuaishou and Youku. A seven-second version set to driving music appeared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

"Clearly pushing these kinds of conspiracy theories, disinformation, does not usually result in any negative consequences for them," said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow in the Asia programme of the German Marshall Fund.


Comment: It would have negative consequences with their own populations if it was blatantly untrue. That's the same reason why Western citizens are increasingly turning away from the Fake News media: bought-and-paid-for press institutions have proven time and again that they can't be trusted not to just make stuff up out of whole cloth.


In April, Russia and Iran largely dropped the bioweapon conspiracy in their overt messaging.

China, however, has carried on.


Comment: To be fair, China continues to be wrongly labeled as the country responsible for the virus, so it's naturally going to continue countering those claims.


In January, as a team from the World Health Organization poured through records in China to try to pinpoint the origins of the virus, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying urged the US to "open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States".


Comment: China allows the WHO in to investigate but the US does not; is that not rather suspect?


Her remarks went viral in China.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it resolutely opposes spreading conspiracy theories. "We have not done it before and will not do it in the future," the ministry said in a statement. "False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and spread of false information."