Since 2019, Chinese influence networks have intensified their operations on US social media
platforms, such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook, exploiting political polarization, the COVID-
19 pandemic, and other global events to promote China’s strategic objectives. Despite substantial
financial backing from local government authorities and propaganda offices at multiple levels
within China, these influence campaigns have largely been characterized by their lack of
sophistication, limiting their overall effectiveness. This has not deterred efforts to improve and
refine strategies as Twitter’s own policies evolved. In response to initial Chinese efforts, in 2020
Twitter’s former owners removed hundreds of thousands of accounts tied to Chinese influence
campaigns and implemented additional safeguards, such as labelling state-affiliated media
accounts and restricting their ability to monetize content.
In 2022, an article published on www.81.cn, the official portal of China’s People’s Liberation Army
(PLA), openly discussed objectives cantered on the strategic use of bots (社交机器人) in public
opinion operations, emphasizing the necessity of multidisciplinary expertise to leverage the
advantages bots can provide. While professionals in this field often come from the humanities
and social sciences, the author, a member of the PLA National Defence University, argued that
effective solutions require leveraging resources such as universities, expert databases, and cloud-
based think tanks to build a specialized “computing propaganda team.” This team would be
equipped, among other things, to enhance bot-driven tactics such as “destroying enemy opinion
leaders, accelerating the dissemination of redundant content to the enemy, submerging its
effective information, comprehensively interfering with the enemy’s information order,
intensifying its internal contradictions, and creating a strong scale effect, thereby taking the lead
in the struggle for public opinion, reversing the direction of dissemination.”
A few months later, in December 2022, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, disbanded the
platform’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group of approximately 100 independent
organizations that Twitter assembled in 2016 to tackle issues like hate speech, child exploitation,
and self-harm. By April 2023, X had removed labels identifying global media organizations as
government-funded or state-affiliated; such labels had been used to highlight outlets under
significant influence from authoritarian governments like Russia and China. It also eliminated
blue verification checks for public figures and deprioritized posts containing external links,
reducing access to verified or external information sources. In February 2024, The Washington
Post reported that X had ceased participating in efforts to counter foreign interference, including
skipping biweekly meetings with other researchers from platforms like Meta and Google’s
YouTube.
As Twitter dismantled these safeguards, Meta reported an increase in Chinese influence
campaigns, leading to a substantial number of account removals on Facebook. In September
2023, NewsGuard, a company that evaluates the credibility of news websites to help users identify
reliable sources, reported that engagement with disinformation-spreading accounts linked to
Russian, Chinese, and Iranian sources on X soared by 70% after the platform removed labels
identifying state-run accounts. In February 2024, researchers noted that out of 123 accounts
flagged by Meta in 2023 for participating in deceptive China-based influence operations, 115
remained active on X. These activities persisted during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign.
With few safeguards in place, X has deepened its collaboration with Chinese organizations aiding
Chinese companies in expanding internationally. In March 2024, X launched the X Reseller
project in collaboration with Feishu Shennuo (飞书深诺) (Meetsocial Group), a leading digital
marketing provider in China. Promoted on Feishu Shennuo’s website as “a high-level cooperation
model between the X platform and domestic agents,” it seeks to accelerate the expansion of
Chinese brands into global markets. This approach is not unique to X, as other platforms like
YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook have similar partnerships with Feishu Shennuo. While it is
difficult to assess the extent to which influence actors, including state-affiliated media, benefit
from each of these partnerships, X’s reduced oversight mechanisms likely create significant
opportunities for such actors to exploit the X-Feishu Shennuo initiative.
For example, the Chinese company ELEX (博智安全), its role in influence operations and ties
with the PRC government security agencies is well understood with its slogan, “Forging Spears
and Shields for National Security” (为国家安全锻矛铸盾). ELEX’s Innovative Products line
includes the Bozhi Public Opinion Control System (博智舆情阵地管控系统), built to support
global influence efforts. The system claims to generate a “large number of anthropomorphic
social accounts,” which are strategically organized to establish an “online public opinion force”
and “independent control of voice channels.” Likely referring to a network of fake social media
accounts, these are deployed across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok,
with tools to efficiently manage these accounts (activation, deactivation, and maintenance). These
features also enable monitoring public sentiment (identifying positive or negative opinions) by
analysing users’ social connections and shared content, allowing for precise adjustments to
influence campaigns.
In September 2024, Intelligence Online , a Paris-based independent publisher, identified Guangzhou
TRS Big Data Co., Ltd. (广州拓尔思大数据有限公司) as the leading provider in China’s public
opinion monitoring efforts. The company specializes in big data processing, mining and
application services for government, public security, customs, and military departments. Its
parent company, TRS Information Technology Co., Ltd. (拓尔思信息技术股份有限公司),
counts among its clients key government entities such as provincial and municipal MPS bureaus,
and over half of China’s provincial cyberspace administration offices. According to the
company’s website, the TRS NetInsight Big Data Analysis Platform (网察大数据分析平台),
central to TRS’s offerings, provides extensive public opinion monitoring and analysis across
diverse media formats, including text, images, and videos.
China’s public opinion monitoring systems play a key role in improving China’s ability to
understand and navigate the information environment of American social media platforms to
amplify its own narratives. The companies described above, whether they are purely marketing
firms or have government ties, serve as benchmarks for China’s capabilities in public opinion
monitoring and influence operations. Their tools provide critical insights into user sentiment and
behaviour, equipping China’s government and businesses with the means to craft and promote
targeted narratives while undermining competing perspectives. China’s public opinion
monitoring systems have largely been tailored to exploiting social media platforms that have held
significant influence over the past two decades, such as Meta’s Facebook and X.
Xi’s China, with a distorted vision to build a “community of shared destiny” takes advantage of
target audiences’ emotions—such as moral outrage, defined as a combination of disgust and
anger—in driving the spread of harmful yet engaging content, as highlighted in a recent Science study by McLoughlin and others. This effect is especially pronounced on X, whose algorithm is
designed in a way that often promotes extremist material. Public opinion monitoring systems
help identify which narratives gain traction and enable real-time adjustments to influence public
opinion. It is high time the international community takes serious note of this burgeoning issue
and curtail these rampant Chinese influence operations.
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