TeamT5

The ubiquity of social media has altered the way people consume information, which in turn dramatically changed the way electoral campaigns are run. From the 2018 municipal elections to the 2020 general elections, Taiwan has witnessed the growing threat of disinformation to the citizens. It was observed that many malicious actors utilized social media to disseminate a huge amount of fake news, false information, and hate speech. These disinformation are like highly contagious viruses that will not only affect the people consuming them, but also make them secondary disseminators. 

To confront the emerging threat of China's Information Operation, TeamT5 threat intelligence team publishes this White Paper covering how China conduct information manipulation across Chinese social media platforms. From the 2019 Hong Kong Protest to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, China has demonstrated the art of surveillance, censorship, and most importantly, digital propaganda.

In this white paper, we focus on China's digital propaganda inside the Great Firewall. We suggest that the regime has developed a unique, organizational, and sophisticated propaganda mechanism, which we dub as "digital propaganda formula." With this formula, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has managed to transform all the Chinese social media platforms inside the Great Firewall into an almost total pro-CCP environment. 

In the final part of our Information Operation White Paper, we will demonstrate China's Information Operations (InfoOps) targeting the global audience. The first part of the report displays a brief overview of its overt operations which are carried out by state media, embassies, and diplomats. Then we look into the covert operations, which can be observed in pro-China fan pages, content farms, and spam botnet. Last but not least, we provide the case study of "Operation Juiker" on Taiwan's largest forum PTT, which suggests the possibility of the APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) actors entering the threat landscape.