As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, a Chinese state-linked influence operation known as Spamouflage has become increasingly aggressive in its efforts to sway American political discourse. The group has expanded its use of personas that impersonate U.S. voters on social media, spreading divisive narratives about sensitive social issues.
Spamouflage Masquerading as American Citizens
Through intelligence reporting from Graphika’s ATLAS, researchers have identified 15 Spamouflage accounts on the social media platform X and one on TikTok that claim to be U.S. citizens or advocates for peace, human rights and information integrity. These accounts frequently used relevant symbols, such as images of U.S. flags and soldiers, in their bios, usernames, and profile pictures, and repeatedly used #American and other such U.S.-related hashtags in their posts.
Source: graphika.comSome accounts went so far as to explicitly make claims that they were American voters, soldiers, or someone who ‘love(s) America’ but had supposedly become disappointed at the U.S. government and the current administration.
In the lead-up to the 2024 election, these accounts have seeded and amplified content denigrating Democratic and Republican candidates, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process, and disseminating divisive narratives on hot-button issues like gun control, homelessness, drug abuse, racial inequality and the Israel-Hamas conflict. Some of this content appears to have been AI-generated, targeting President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Source: graphika.comDespite these attempts to appear authentic, the accounts bore hallmarks of Spamouflage activity, including discrepancies in bio information, frequent use of stock images as profile picture images, and coordinated attempts at amplification of the similar posts and content from accounts flagged as belonging to the campaign.
These accounts were observed to have largely failed to gain traction within genuine online communities discussing the election with the exception of an inauthentic media outlet on TikTok that posted a video in July 2023 and received about 1.5 million views.
China Influence Ops Expand as Election Grows Close
The new report builds on previous research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which in April 2024 documented four Spamouflage accounts on X posing as supporters of Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, suggesting that the operation’s efforts are larger than previously concluded.
The researchers assess that Spamouflage and other Chinese influence operation actors will almost certainly continue their attempts to sway U.S. political conversations throughout the 2024 election cycle. They are likely to leverage social divisions in the polarized information environment to portray the U.S. as a declining global power with weak leadership and a failing system of governance.
Spamouflage, also known as Dragonbridge, Taizi Flood and Empire Dragon, has been monitored by these researchers since 2019. The operation is active across more than 40 online platforms, using inauthentic accounts to seed and amplify content promoting pro-China and anti-Western narratives.
Over the past five years, Spamouflage’s tactics have evolved, engaging with broader geopolitical topics, producing content in multiple languages, experimenting with persona building, and leveraging AI tools to create content. The operation has become markedly more aggressive in its attempts to influence online discourse about U.S. politics.
While in 2020 the operation frequently criticized the U.S. political system and policies without directly referencing elections, by the months before the 2022 midterms, Spamouflage began explicitly engaging with election-related topics. It spread content criticizing the Republican and Democratic parties and their leaders, casting U.S. domestic and foreign policy ‘failures’ as a product of the country’s political system.
The researchers have observed a worrying increase in these operations since mid-2023, along with the seeding of content that denigrates U.S. election candidates such as Harris, Trump and the current president Biden, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the electoral process, and escalating divisive narratives across the nation.
Other China-linked actors are also pushing influence campaigns. Just last month, an AI-controlled X (formerly Twitter) network was reported to be amplifying divisive content.
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