What motivates foreign actors?
Jensen, the Rand Corp. researcher, said it’s in foreign adversaries interest to polarize — and thus disrupt — the U.S., calling it a “low-cost strategy.”
“It’s highly effective in terms of sowing discord and exacerbating an already polarized climate,” Jensen said.
Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, said such efforts have been successful in the past.
“It’s easy to exploit natural disasters because there’s always some degree of chaos in the service delivery,” West said.
Making U.S. agencies look incompetent has real-world impact, West said. He pointed to North Carolina relief work that was paused Oct. 13 because of threats against FEMA responders.
Graphika’s analysts said foreign actors spread false narratives to portray the U.S. in chaos and declining in power. The Chinese activities usually didn’t generate meaningful engagement from authentic audiences on the platforms they were shared on.
A Sept. 11 New York Times article echoed that point, saying the impact of the Chinese campaign after the Maui fires “is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories.” Researchers cited in the Times article “suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election.”
Sinclair said her research shows that one major reason foreign governments seek to spread false narratives online is to distract people from other news events that may put their own nations in an unfavorable light. For example, Russia may seek to distract people from focusing on its war with Ukraine.
When China first started sowing misinformation online, its goal was mostly to make China look good, or deflect attention from things such as the Hong Kong protests, Sinclair said.
“But recently, they’ve really stepped up, going on attack, and engaging in a lot of the tactics that Russia had been using,” she said.
Those include “stoking conspiracy theories, disseminating disinformation, creating political fractures, and generally trying to weaken the United States as well as other Western countries,” she said.
Read the entire article here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/oct/14/are-foreign-adversaries-china-and-russia-amplifyin/