This article is from Democracy Digest:

China has been buying up ads on U.S. social-media sites and adopting online tactics reminiscent of Russian disinformation campaigns in an apparent attempt to shape the story internationally about the coronavirus response, according to researchers analyzing the activity, the Wall Street Journal reports (HT;FDD):

China has bought more than 200 political ads on Facebook since the end of 2018, but more than a third have been purchased in the past two months, said Vanessa Molter, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cyber-policy institute. Most of the recent ads focused on trying to shape global perception around China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, she said….. China’s state-media political advertising on Facebook has drawn as many as 109 million views over the past 14 months, about 45 million of them since Feb. 15. That reach is far larger than the estimated 40 million impressions that Russia’s Internet Research Agency obtained in its disinformation operations around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For Beijing, Taiwan’s successful pandemic response poses dual challenges, undercutting the Communist Party’s claims to superiority over liberal democracies, and bolstering a sense of local identity among the many Taiwanese who object to China’s efforts to isolate and assimilate the island, Chun Han Wong writes for the Wall Street Journal.

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