Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer now living in exile in the Philadelphia suburbs, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s reaction lately has been harsh, with crude and ominously personal attacks online.
A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has bombarded not only Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at Clemson University and Meta. owner of Facebook and Instagram.
The content, posted by users under false identities, appeared in replies to Mr Deng’s posts on X, the social platform, as well as on the accounts of public schools in his community, where the daughter, aged 16, has been falsely portrayed as a drug user, arsonist and prostitute.
“I tried to delete these posts,” Deng said of the online attacks, speaking in Mandarin Chinese in an interview, “but I didn’t succeed, because today you try to delete them and tomorrow they just switch to new accounts to get out.” attack the text and the language.”
Vulgar comments directed at the girl have also appeared on community pages on Facebook and even on sites like TripAdvisor; Patch, a community news platform; and Niche, a website that helps parents choose schools, according to the researchers.
The harassment fits a pattern of online bullying that has raised alarm bells in Washington, as well as in Canada and other countries where China’s attacks have become increasingly brazen. The campaign has included thousands of posts that investigators have linked to a network of social media accounts known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, an arm of the country’s vast propaganda apparatus.
China has long tried to discredit Chinese critics, but targeting a teenager in the United States is an escalation, said Darren Linvill, founder of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, whose researchers documented the campaign against Deng. Federal law prohibits harassment or serious threats online, but that does not appear to deter China’s efforts.
“There’s no doubt this crosses a line they haven’t crossed before,” Linvill said. “I think that suggests the lines are losing meaning.”
China’s propaganda apparatus has also stepped up attacks on the United States generally, including efforts to discredit President Biden ahead of the November presidential election.
“They are exporting their repression efforts and human rights abuses, attacking, threatening and harassing those who dare to question their legitimacy or authority even outside China, even here in the United States,” said Christopher A. Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the American Bar Association in Washington in April.
Wray said China was exerting “intense, almost mafia-style pressure” to try to silence dissidents now living legally in the United States, including online and offline activities such as posting leaflets near their homes.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement that he was not aware of the Deng case and had no comment. He added that the State Council government issued regulations in China last year to protect the safety of teenagers online.
In a statement, Meta said it had removed Facebook accounts targeting the Dengs as part of its monitoring of Spamouflage activity. The statement said the activity had not gained much traction on Facebook. Patch and Niche said they, too, had removed the accounts for violating their usage standards. X and TripAdvisor did not respond to requests for comment.
Not all posts targeting the Dengs were deleted, according to Linvill’s team at Clemson. New posts also keep popping up, and even traces of posts that are deleted can remain online for years. Spamouflage attacks still show up in Google searches for Deng and his daughter, for example.
Attacks from China have been a challenge for government and law enforcement officials in the United States. Last year, the Justice Department indicted 34 officials working for China’s Ministry of State Security for harassing U.S. residents like Deng, but the officials live (and presumably continue to work) in China, out of reach. of American law. application.
Some have called for a more aggressive response, including Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
“We need to educate and train law enforcement officials and the American people to understand the tactics of the CCP,” he said in a statement, referring to the party, “and protect the people who seek safe haven in our country.”
The Spamouflage network was first identified in 2019 during mass anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong. Create inauthentic accounts on social networks or technology platforms to bombard real users with spam-like content, hence the name that researchers have given to the network. While the content often fails to go viral, the swarm nature of the attacks can be a nuisance, or worse, for recipients.
The network, which Meta linked last year to law enforcement agencies in China, once focused most of its attention on the country to discredit and intimidate critics of the Communist Party, such as protesters in Hong Kong.
He has become increasingly active abroad, seeking to influence political debates and elections in Taiwan, Canada and, at least since the 2022 midterm elections, in the United States. An American Olympic figure skater and her father, a former political refugee from China, were the targets of what the Justice Department described as a spy operation ordered by Beijing. Chinese journalists working abroad, especially women, have also been portrayed in fake escort ads and faced bomb and rape threats.
The Justice Department’s indictment of Ministry of State Security agents did not explicitly link them to the Spamouflage network, but the activities described accurately reflect their work and appear “extremely likely” to be the same operation, according to a recent Institute report. for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research group. The institute also warned that the network is increasingly focusing on the US presidential elections.
In Mr. Deng’s case, as in others, the intention appears to be to silence criticism. Deng, who was born in Xinyu in southeastern China, once worked as an assistant editor at Study Times, a weekly newspaper of the Communist Party Central School that trains rising officials.
His comments sometimes crossed party lines. He was fired in 2013 after writing an opinion essay for The Financial Times (which appeared in its Chinese and English editions) in which he called for China to abandon its strategic ties with North Korea’s erratic authoritarian leader, Kim Jong Un. -a. He eventually left the country.
Deng, 56, has lived in the United States with his wife and two children since 2018. He continues to publish essays in various media outlets and books on Chinese politics and foreign policy. The latest book was “The Last Totalitarian,” published in Chinese in April by Bouden House in New York. In it, he argues that the Communist Party has lost the faith of the people and needs to reform.
In the interview, Deng said he was used to criticism from China’s bureaucracy, but that the personal attacks began after he published an article in February in which he compared Xi’s cadre of senior officials to the Gang of Four under Mao. Zedong.
The first post that Clemson researchers spotted appeared that month on X, where Mr. Deng’s account has more than 100,000 followers. It mentioned a high school in the family’s hometown and their daughter. The harassment spread to other X accounts and then to numerous platforms, including Facebook, Medium, Pinterest, DeviantArt and Pixiv, a Japanese site for artists.
The posts denounced him as a traitor, plagiarist and tool of the United States. According to Clemson’s investigation, more than 5,700 posts to date on X alone have featured his daughter.
User profiles often made them appear American, albeit with few or even no followers. Many posts featured stilted, ungrammatical English, a signature of Spamouflage campaigns.
They became increasingly creepy and threatening. Manipulated images appeared on Facebook with Deng’s daughter’s face superimposed on scantily clad women, advertising sex for $300. At least one post called for her to be sexually assaulted and offered an $8,000 reward.
His daughter, who speaks English with a teenager’s fluency in Gen Z slang, was also initially angry about the attacks, Deng said, but, encouraged by him, she also tried to ignore them. “I want to do everything I can to not involve my family in my affairs,” she said.
Meta, Google, and other major tech platforms have long been aware of Spamouflage’s activities and have sought to limit its reach. Last year, Meta announced that it had removed more than 7,700 fake Facebook accounts linked to the network in one quarter alone.
Clemson’s Linvill said China’s tactics would likely continue because the country “had not yet faced any significant repercussions beyond account terminations, and that doesn’t represent any cost from their perspective.”
Bing Guan contributed with reports.
