Samantha Hill’s crazed COVID-19 spaghetti chart looks like something out of an It’s Always Sunny meme—with blame for everyone from Steve Bannon to seafood export companies. But the intricate conspiracy isn’t an organic act of lunacy. Instead, the content and fake accounts pushing it are linked to a known pro-China disinformation outfit that’s looking to blame both the U.S. and Gilead, maker of a popular COVID-19 drug, for the global coronavirus pandemic.
Facebook says the fake accounts found by The Daily Beast are linked to a previous effort by sock puppets to attack the Chinese Communist Party’s adversaries and spread myths about the origin of the coronavirus. So what’s behind this latest attempt to hoodwink social media users about where COVID-19 came from and the drugmaker helping to fight it?
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A Facebook spokesperson said the accounts use some of the same methods as a recently busted pro-China propaganda push. One red flag: some of the accounts appear to have been created by a Bangladesh-based account farm. After The Daily Beast shared the posts with Facebook representatives, the company suspended them and they’ll remain suspended unless and until they can prove they’re operated by an authentic person.
Narrative: The accounts pushed a rambling 1,300 word narrative aimed at seeking to absolve China of its role as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic and instead place the blame on the U.S. The fake story takes the form of a confession by a fictitious medical researcher who worked at Fort Detrick, a former Army bioweapons laboratory that now houses the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), and Gilead, the pharmaceutical company that makes the antiviral remdesivir used in the fight against COVID-19.
In the fictional persona’s telling, Gilead—which, in the real world, first worked with USAMRIID to develop remdesivir as an Ebola-fighting drug—secretly created the coronavirus in a lab alongside the U.S. military and accidentally leaked it in Maryland. The narrative is a mirror image of American conspiracy theories popularized by the Trump administration about a fictional leak of the virus from a Chinese lab in Wuhan, China.
To explain away the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan, the conspiracy author seizes on recent news that Chinese authorities discovered coronavirus in imported frozen food to claim that a Navy sailor involved in the fake experiments somehow managed to seal up coronavirus in a package of frozen food sent to China.
Targets: The fact that China-linked actors would embrace Western-style conspiracy theories in order to deflect blame for the COVID-19 pandemic is hardly new. At the beginning of the outbreak, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao tweeted approvingly about a conspiracy theory that pinned the blame for the outbreak on USAMRIID.
What’s new in this latest bit of disinformation is that the actors seek not just to discredit the U.S. but an American pharmaceutical giant that produces one of the only drugs proven effective at treating COVID-19. A Gilead executive and researcher are all name-checked as villains in the story with the author falsely claiming the company “spread MERS in the Middle East so as to test the effects of a new medicine but dodge the federal restrictions.”
This narrative also takes a different twist in its attempt to play on the oldest and deepest fault line in American life: race. The fake author’s story paints a picture of researchers and the CIA happy to let the virus ravage Black communities without warning about the leak because they “believed that SARS-II would not do huge damages to Caucasians in America due to the different distribution of ACE2 in different races.”
It’s not the first time that a disinformation campaign has sought to play up America’s troubled history of race and medicine. As The Daily Beast recently reported, an Iran-aligned disinformation effort managed to trick Twitter into verifying a World Health Organization executive impersonator to allege a fake conspiracy about Tuskegee-style experiments on Black Americans with a coronavirus vaccine.
Audience: It’s hard to say who the target audience is for the Gilead conspiracy narrative is based on the sparse details available but there are some indications that the author may have been trying to pitch South Asian or Indian readers on the fake conspiracy narrative.
The fake author holds herself out as someone who “used to be an American, but I am more of an Indian” and includes a number of Hindu religious references throughout the piece. A number of the Facebook and Twitter accounts that copied and spread the story also used Hindi-language hashtags for “novel coronavirus” (#नयाकोरोनावाइरस) and “viruses” (#वाइरस) in order to spread the story to a presumably Hindi-speaking audience.
It’s hard to say whether it’s intentional or not but the story also appears to have captured a domestic audience within China. Zhao Shengye, a popular poster on the Chinese microblogging website Weibo, claimed to have stumbled onto a Facebook post with the conspiracy narrative and translated it into Mandarin for his audience. In the process, he racked up 80,000 likes and 20,000 shares of the post.
That’s a bit surprising, given that the original posters on Facebook and Twitter had few followers and received little engagement until Zhao’s post was published and Facebook is banned in China, although Chinese netizens are capable of accessing the uncensored Internet with the help of virtual private networks and other proxy services.
In any case, Chinese authorities have tacitly approved of the post’s publishing after it went up. Chinese authorities heavily censor social media, especially on sensitive subjects like the origin of the coronavirus and foreign policy, and a post that viral would almost certainly be censored if it offended Communist Party sensibilities.
Methods: The hoaxsters used traditional social media methods—fake Twitter and Facebook accounts—but also added a slightly different twist in the form of a link to a Google Docs document. The document served as a handy container for the long-winded conspiracy theory since neither Twitter nor Facebook could accommodate its 1,300 word diatribe.
The authors also used fake accounts generated by a Bangladesh-based account farm, which specializes in registering fake social media profiles they can sell to commercial spammers and other shady actors.
“There’s an interesting pattern between a number of these accounts and a small network of accounts trying to be human,” Benjamin Strick, a researcher who first discovered a network of pro-Chinese disinformation accounts subsequently suspended by Twitter. They all appear to try and celebrate their first tweet with a script that forgets the space after the final character and enters it twice.”
Attribution: So who’s behind the network? It’s tough to say for sure but some of the initial signs at least are similar to previously documented China-aligned disinformation campaigns.
The use of the Bangladesh-based account farm is one of the tactics used by a disinformation activity dubbed “Spamouflage Dragon” by the social media analytics firm Graphika.
Graphika found Spamouflage Dragon active in spreading disinformation about the 2019 protests in Hong Kong against harsh new security laws proposed by pro-Chinese Communist Party leaders in the Special Administrative Region. The activity also spilled over into 2020 and an August report from Graphika documented similar actors pushing COVID-19 conspiracy content on YouTube and Twitter with the help of AI-generated avatars.
Graphika’s investigation found that Spamouflage Dragon was linked to disinformation activity that Twitter had removed from its network and attributed to the Chinese government. Graphika, however, was not able to independently determine who was behind Spamouflage Dragon.
While Facebook says the activity documented by The Daily Beast appears linked to that group, neither we nor Facebook are able to confirm with certainty who published the content.
