Tonight, the Chinese government going after people on American soil. The threats against people the government deems are critics. They come as President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet in California. Donio Sullivan is here with an investigation that you'll see first out front. I feel.
Really, really afraid.
They use hateful words or threatening words.
They will make life very uncomfortable for those who speak ill of China.
They are here on American soil thousands of miles from Beijing, but still being hounded and harassed by the Chinese government.
I was instantly flooded with messages asking me to kill myself.
Her name is GI-Yang Fan, a writer for The New Yorker. She's been targeted with a wave of online harassment since she covered pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong four years ago. More than 12,000 tweets calling her a traitor.
I was caught so off guard and I wasn't sure if it was a coordinated effort.
It is a coordinated effort of fake and anonymous accounts, and it's called spammiflage.
Depending on how you measure it, it's the biggest disinformation campaign the world's.
Ever seen. Professor Darren Linville from Clemson's Media Forensics Hub has tracked spamma flous for years, but it's only now been revealed that the vast disinformation campaign is tied to the Chinese government.
Thousands and thousands of messages repeated over and over again.
A CNN review of court documents, social media reports, and interviews with victims reveals a massive, relentless campaign of intimidation by the Chinese government, targeting people on US soil.
They told me they will kill me if I don't delete my YouTube.
Jaugin Cheu post pro-democracy YouTube videos criticizing the Chinese government from his office here at this church in Virginia. To hit back, the Chinese trolls post thousands of messages attacking him.
They cover people's eyes, so the Chinese people cannot see the reality.
A vast campaign of intimidation that even employs artists to create original illustrations to mock and harass its victims. This is not just some guy in his basement.
No, I think it's clearly a very sophisticated effort. I'm often staggered at the number of platforms where we come across their content.
Some of the people behind spamoflage are these Chinese police officers, according to the US Department of Justice. The DOJ charged 34 Chinese police officers for using social media accounts to threaten, harass, and intimidate specific victims in the United States. The indictment is full of pictures allegedly taken from inside the special trolling unit showing laptops, phones, and other equipment used as part of the operation. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC said the DOJ's allegations are politically motivated and have no factual evidence or legal basis.
Yeah, they try to shut me up. They try to silence me to minimize my voice.
Chen Po Kong spent nearly five years in a Chinese prison for his pro-democracy work. Now he's an American citizen and campaigns from here.
They started to make noises, yelling, shouting.
At the height of COVID in 2021, he organized a Zoom meeting for pro-Chinese democracy activists in the US. But Chinese police officers, part of spamifage, broke into the Zoom and shut it down.
I said, What? The CCP don't even have a lot to have a meeting over this meeting.
The US State Department has warned that the Chinese government is spending billions of dollars annually on foreign information manipulation efforts, and if it goes unchecked, it will reshape the global information landscape.
A Communist Party's bloodstream is propaganda, repeating it over and over again and trying to get everyone to repeat that same point of view and reject alternatives. That's in the DNA of Communist Parties.
Aaron, we talked so much about these troll groups and things like that, but what's remarkable there is, thanks to the US Department of Justice, but also the work of Meta, formerly Facebook, we have faces. Some Chinese police officers, people who go to work in Beijing every day, clock in, clock out, their job is not patrolling the streets, but it is posting these messages online over and over and over again. You heard there, just from Americans who really don't know what to do, where to turn because what this Chinese campaign is doing is leveraging and exploiting freedom of speech in this country and the openness of this society to intimidate and target these people.
It is incredible, and incredible that they go to work every day in Beijing just to be able to do that. Incredible that you could be able to get those individuals to speak to you as well.
A CNN review finds the Chinese government built up the world's largest known online disinformation operation and uses it as part ...