Posted on 01/30/2025 9:56:04 AM PST by nickcarraway
Intelligence firm Graphika said a Beijing-linked campaign known as "Spamouflage" spread disinformation about Spain's deadly floods last year.
A Chinese online influence operation impersonated a human rights group in Spain to spread calls on social media for the Spanish government to be overthrown following deadly floods in Valencia last year, according to research by intelligence firm Graphika.
The Chinese state-linked campaign — dubbed "Spamouflage" by analysts — posed as the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders on social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok and X to circulate content criticising the government's response to the floods that killed at least 225 people last October, found a report by the US-based firm.
Spamouflage has used thousands of accounts to spam content across at least 50 websites, forums and social media platforms in recent years, with its targets ranging from US voters to Canadian lawmakers, according to analysts from both Graphika and the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
However, this latest campaign marks the first time that the Beijing-linked operation has directly called for the overthrow of a foreign government, according to Graphika's Chief Intelligence Officer Jack Stubbs.
"This activity shows Chinese online influence operations are becoming more aggressive in their attempts to manipulate domestic political conversations in Western countries and undermine Beijing’s critics," he told Euronews.
The Chinese embassy in Madrid and the Spanish government could not be immediately reached for comment.
Graphika said it had identified dozens of social media accounts posting content in both English and Spanish that purported to show Safeguard Defenders condemning the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the regional administration of Valencia's leader Carlos Mazón.
The key post in the campaign was a video — overlaid with the Safeguard Defenders’ logo — in which a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and claiming to be with the NGO said they wanted to "expose" authorities for giving up on normal people. The video, which was posted on X but has since been removed, ends with a call to topple the government.
Graphika also flagged content that had misspelled Mazón’s name as "Carlos Ma Song," which analysts said was most likely a Chinese transliteration.
'Sustained attack'
The campaign was almost certainly intended to discredit Safeguard Defenders, which Spamouflage has repeatedly targeted after the NGO accused the Chinese government of running police stations overseas in EU countries in 2022, according to Graphika.
Laura Harth, a director at Safeguard Defenders who focuses on China, said the NGO had been under a "renewed multi-lingual and sustained attack" aimed at casting doubt on its work since publishing its research into the secret Chinese police stations in 2022.
"Since last summer, we have definitely seen an increase in the creativity, technical expertise and resources dedicated to this campaign against us," she told Euronews.
Spamouflage has targeted several countries since 2017, but ramped up its activities last year ahead of November's US presidential election and impersonated American voters in a bid to influence political conversations around the vote, Graphika said in September.
In response, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman at the Chinese embassy in Washington, rejected Graphika's findings as full of "prejudice and malicious speculation" and said that Beijing would not interfere in the US election.
In October 2023, the Canadian government said the operation had left thousands of comments spreading disinformation and propaganda on the social media accounts of several MPs, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A Meta report from August 2023 described Spamouflage as "the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world" and said it had links to Chinese law enforcement.
Compared with conventional warfare or economic sanctions, online influence operations are seen by malicious state actors alike as a cheap and low-risk way to hurt geopolitical adversaries by undermining trust among citizens in their governments, analysts say.
Sun Tzu advised defeating the enemy without firing a shot.
Given the past 15 years of color revolutions, I have to question whether this is a Chinese operation, or local, or someone else.
Yes, dictators across the world, whether the CCP, Putin, North Korea, the Mullahs in Tehran and others, all are going to use the technology of the “social media”, and Email, and the celll phone systems, to highten divisions and dissent, in all democracies. Democracies need to be made to look weak and socially fragile. It helps the dictators sell their “stability” as “better” than the freedoms of others.
Many of our own western governments tried the same measures against their own citizens during Covid, selling “stablity” and “unity” over freedom of speech, including the freedom to question the governments’ “stabliity” measures. Freedom of speech has eventually won, but we paid a high price during the time we had to struggle to get it back.
Now when anyone is critical of the typical government failures in responding to disasters, the government labels it “disinformation”, finds the foreign site that hosts the unflattering truthful comments, and calls it a hostile foreign attack.
It’s truly becoming boring.
Spain’s government is led by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez who among other things has given formal recognition to a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria (The West Bank).
From Israel’s perspective the Spanish government might be worth overthrowing.
In fact, Argentine President Javier Milei who is a friend of Israel, went to Spain last year making a speech trashing the Spanish Prime Minister’s wife as a crook.
She has been under investigation.
Israel has a big beef with Spain over its decision last year to recognize a Palestinian state.
Now along comes AI and quad computing, NOTHING will be trustworthy!
And yes, I do see this as (more) acts of war.
Pretty blatant when they call for the overthrow of a government.
Spain should threaten to establish official relations with Taiwan if China doesn’t stop.
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