SINCE RUSSIA BOMBARDED the 2016 election with Twitter trolls and astroturfed lies, election watchers have been on guard against social media “influence operations.” Four years later, Iran took a stab at meddling in the 2020 presidential election, with more mixed results. Now, the People’s Republic of China—or, at least, a group with a long-running pro-Chinese government agenda—seems to be trying out its own political influence operation just ahead of this year’s US midterm elections. And while that operation seems to have largely failed this time, the campaign represents the growing boldness of a new adversary in the fight against organized disinformation.
On Wednesday, cybersecurity and threat intelligence firm Mandiant published new findings about a group it calls Dragonbridge, which it’s seen for years promoting pro-Chinese interests in fake grassroots social media campaigns designed to influence politics in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Now, Mandiant’s analysts have tied Dragonbridge to a series of more US-focused influence campaigns. The group claimed that a notorious hacking spree carried out by known Chinese state-sponsored hackers was actually carried out by US intelligence, falsely blamed the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline on the US government, and—perhaps most brazenly—seeded hundreds of posts on social media designed to demoralize voters and reduce turnout ahead of the November midterms.
“This actor has been rapidly growing and hyper-aggressive. They went from carrying out limited campaigns focused on Hong Kong to a global operation on dozens of platforms,” says John Hultquist, Mandiant’s VP of intelligence analysis. “Interfering in our elections is just another line that they’re clearly willing to cross.”
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