China is mining Western social media to equip its army and police with info on overseas targets, in keeping with a brand new report by The Washington Post. This revelation was made following the evaluate of tons of of Chinese bidding paperwork, contracts, and firm filings.
This new report says that China maintains a nationwide community of knowledge surveillance companies that have been developed over the previous decade and are used domestically to warn officers of politically delicate info on-line.
The software program, which targets home Internet customers and media, additionally collects information on overseas targets from sources akin to Twitter, Facebook, and different Western social media.
The paperwork accessed by the Washington-based publication additionally present that Chinese companies together with state media, propaganda departments, police, army and cyber regulators are buying new or extra refined programs to collect information.
The report states that the Chinese state media software program program mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of overseas journalists and lecturers.
The report additional reveals {that a} Beijing police intelligence program analyses Western content material on Hong Kong and Taiwan. It additionally catalogues Uyghur language content material overseas.
“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” mentioned a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department.
The unit was as soon as tasked with producing an information report on how destructive content material referring to Beijing’s senior management is unfold on Twitter, together with profiles of particular person lecturers, politicians, and journalists, in keeping with the report.
“They are now reorienting part of that effort outward, and I think that’s frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China,” mentioned Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow on the German Marshall Fund, as quoted by The Washington Post.
She added: “It really shows that they now feel it’s their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight the public opinion war overseas.”
Leave a Reply