Updated on 2022-10-30: Chinese influence operation designed to ‘sow political discord’ ahead of midterms
So we’re back to Russia China trying to influence the U.S. elections, according to new research by Google cyber unit Mandiant. The research shows the pro-Chinese government actors, known as Dragonbridge, are “aggressively” targeting the U.S. ahead of the midterms next week by using “narratives regarding racial strife and social injustice” on social media. That’s pretty much torn right out of the Russian-2016 playbook. It’s just the latest example of how pro-China actors are influencing Americans. @ShaneHuntley drops some knowledge bombs from Google TAG’s point of view. Read more: Chinese influence operation seeks to sow political discord, ‘aggressively’ targets U.S. midterms
Today, @Mandiant published a piece on a pro-PRC coordinated influence actor https://t.co/57Z9XOfi1O. Some observations on what Google TAG is seeing from DRAGONBRIDGE 🧵 1/6
— Shane Huntley (@ShaneHuntley) October 26, 2022
Overview: DragonBridge
Two weeks ago, this newsletter covered a weird social media influence operation where a group of Chinese bots tried to mislabel the Chinese APT41 cyber-espionage group as the US NSA. This week, Mandiant confirmed that this was indeed a well-coordinated social media influence operation, one the company tracks as DragonBridge. In addition, the same operation also tried to discredit the US democratic process, including attempts to discourage Americans from voting in the 2022 US midterm elections, and promoted the conspiracy theory that the US was responsible for the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions. Alethea Group confirmed seeing the same thing in a separate report. Read more:
