Over 123 Chinese Websites Pose as Local News Outlets in 30 Countries

This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Frank Fang

At least 123 Chinese websites are disguised as local news outlets in 30 countries to disseminate pro-Beijing disinformation, according to a recent report from Citizen Lab, a digital watchdog at Canada’s University of Toronto.

“The campaign is an example of a sprawling influence operation serving both financial and political interests, and in alignment with Beijing’s political agenda,” Alberto Fittarelli, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, wrote in his Feb. 7 report.

He called the campaign “Paperwall,” which he defined as “a large, and fast growing, network of anonymous websites posing as local news outlets.” The United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the UK, France, Brazil, Turkey, and Italy were among the 30 countries allegedly targeted by the campaign.

To disguise themselves as legitimate local news outlets, Paperwall websites often used local references as part of their names, such as Eiffel Post and Provence Daily for two French-language websites. Other website names included British FT targeting the UK, Sendai Shimbum and Fujiyama Times for Japan, Daegu Journal and Busan Online for South Korea, and Roma Journal and Napoli Money for Italy.

The lone website targeting the U.S. audience was UpdateNews.Info, a domain name registered in July 2019 and the first Paperwall website to be registered, according to the report.

Citizen Lab researchers said the campaign’s effect has been “negligible so far,” given the “minimal traffic” toward the websites and the lack of social media amplification or visible mainstream media coverage.

However, the report warned that the campaign shouldn’t be considered harmless—it can “eventually pay enormous dividends once one of those fragments is eventually picked up and legitimized by mainstream press or political figures.”

Content

Paperwall websites also “regularly republish content, verbatim, from legitimate online sources in the target country” to make their sites appear legitimate, according to the report. For example, the report includes a screengrab of the Eiffel Post website republishing an article from the French daily newspaper Le Parisien.

These websites also featured verbatim reposts of content from China’s state-run media, such as China Global Television Network, the global arm of state broadcaster China Central Television, according to the report.

A significant portion of these websites’ content originated from Times Newswire, according to Mr. Fittarelli.

“We found evidence that Times Newswire regularly seeds pro-Beijing political content, including ad hominem attacks, by concealing it within large amounts of seemingly benign commercial content,” the report reads.

Read the full story at The Epoch Times.