Digital Media and Disinformation Fellow Bret Schafer spoke to NBC News about Beijing’s Twitter offensive during the coronavirus pandemic.
China has launched a Twitter offensive in the coronavirus information war, more than doubling its number of official government tweets since January and in recent days using the platform to spread a conspiracy theory that the virus came from a U.S. government lab.
Beijing has pushed out 90,000 tweets since the start of April from 200 diplomatic and state-run media accounts as part of an offensive in the coronavirus information war, according to data collected by the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a tool that aggregates accounts connected to the Chinese government.
Bret Schafer, the digital disinformation fellow at the alliance, based in Washington, D.C., has been tracking China’s increasing social media output for months.