BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “THE DISINFORMATION DRAGON”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 9th March 2021 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 14th March 2021 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Paul Kenyon & Krassimira Twigg PRODUCER: Jim Booth EDITOR: Lucy Proctor
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6346LH0 - 1 -
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 9th March 2021 Repeat: Sunday 14th March 2021
Producer: Jim Booth Reporter: Paul Kenyon & Krassimira Twigg Editor: Lucy Proctor ______
MUSIC
EXTRACT FROM CGTN NEWS REPORT, 18/2/2021
MAN: Almost two years later after the shutdown of …, we are again here at Fort Detrick.
KENYON: This is a news report suggesting that the coronavirus might originally have come, not from China, but from a military research base in Maryland, America. It was made by Chinese state television, and aimed at an international audience - you and me.
MAN: It was here where five residents have died following an outbreak of respiratory illness that began in the summer of 2019.
KENYON: The suspicions aired in the report are baseless. It is innuendo and misinformation dressed up as investigative journalism. And tonight, an insider from China’s state television tells us why it’s happening.
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INSIDER: It’s China’s official news office, so it’s from the top that has definitely issued this. And it’s a whole nation strategy to kind of fight back, to make people think, you know, we are innocent.
KENYON: In the last twelve months, Chinese state-sponsored misinformation has swept into millions of homes around the world. Chances are you’ll have seen it, but you won’t know where it originated.
HOWARD: It’s generated by actors who we don’t even know if they’re actually connected to a state’s government spy agency.
KENYON: Tonight, File on 4 reveals China’s new experiment in global disinformation that has even targeted Western Covid vaccines.
CARVIN: With the emergence of Covid, China created a whole new information cocktail, a perfect storm of circumstances in which China suddenly realised that playing hardball was probably going to be the only way they could get through the crisis from their perspective.
KENYON: Inside BBC Broadcasting House in the centre of London, is a department called BBC Monitoring. Its job is to assess and analyse media from around the world - from state-run television in Iran to Russian newspapers and Chinese social media.
TWIGG: My name is Krassi Twigg. I work at BBC Monitoring. I studied in China, I speak the language, and I follow the country closely.
KENYON: This time last year, Krassi and her colleagues noticed a step change in China’s approach to the global information war.
TWIGG: What we saw was that China became a lot more assertive internationally. It really wanted to add its voice, its truth to the Covid narrative and shape perceptions of its role in the pandemic. And it didn’t shy away from throwing mud at others in order to mend its own image, and that was new. - 3 -
KENYON: My name is Paul Kenyon, and I’ve reported from some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes. But I began my career before the internet was even invented - when propaganda was pushed through state-controlled newspapers, television and radio, and it was left to us, journalists, to try to separate truth from fiction. Now, there’s no filter. It’s down to each one of us to judge the veracity of what we read online. So, I’m joining forces with Krassi, who’s more adept at exploring the far-reaches of the internet; a universe of bots and diplomats called the wolf warriors, and something called the spamouflage dragon.
EXTRACT FROM CHINESE TV
KENYON: It is mid-January 2020. Chinese TV is about to make an announcement that will change the world. BBC Monitoring has just picked it up.
TWIGG: It was state media acknowledging for the first time that a flu-like illness in Wuhan was caused by a new coronavirus. There was a lot of chatter on social media in the weeks before, with people wondering what was going on, but state media was very slow to report on it. The Chinese New Year was around the corner, it was supposed to be a happy, auspicious time - not a time to lock people inside their homes.
KENYON: China’s instinct was to contain and control the news, to avoid panic and social unrest and to protect the reputation of the People’s Republic and its ruling Communist Party. China’s hardly unique of course - other governments play down bad news all the time - it is what we used to call spin.
CARVIN: My name is Andy Carvin and I’m senior fellow and managing editor of the Digital Forensic Research Lab. We are a research centre at the Atlantic Council, which is a Washington, DC-based think tank. What’s interesting is that, until recently, China tended to focus on what is often referred to as discourse power. They would use their many platforms, both domestically and internationally, to emphasise their soft power - how they were helpful to the world and how they were putting their best foot forward.
MUSIC - 4 -
TWIGG: In those first few days, China’s approach was to play up its courage and commitment in dealing with the crisis, not to play down others. In fact, spreading fake news on coronavirus was actually an arrestable offence.
KENYON: Then, on January 26th last year, a man from Inner Mongolia put a message on social media. With no evidence at all, he suggested the coronavirus had not emerged naturally, but was a bio-weapon, engineered by the United States.
CARVIN: It’s not unusual for people to gossip among themselves, but when those same types of conversations take place online, there’s always the possibility that they can escalate very quickly, because one person’s rumour or speculation becomes a potential source of another person, which can then become an actual claim of fact, even though there’s no basis in fact on that.
TWIGG: The originator of this particular story was arrested by the Chinese authorities and jailed for spreading false rumours. Then, as the UK recorded its first two cases of Covid-19 on the 31st January 2020, some powerful voices in America began tweeting that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese biolab in Wuhan
EXTRACT FROM SPEECH BY PRESIDENT TRUMP
TRUMP: It comes from China ….
TWIGG: It wasn’t long before the White House went on the offensive.
TRUMP: Covid-19. That name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus … Kung Flu …
KENYON: Conspiracy websites lit up across the United States. The InfoWars host, Alex Jones, said the virus was designed by China to destabilise Trump. Others began pointing to the 5G network that was sourced from China, blaming it for somehow spreading the virus. - 5 -
TWIGG: Back in Beijing, China changed tack. An elaborate, anti-US rumour emerged and this time the Chinese Government allowed it to spread. It was centred on an event that took place in October 2019 - before anyone had even heard of coronavirus - when athletes from around the world had gathered in Wuhan for something called the Military World Games.
CGTN CLIP OF THE MILITARY WORLD GAMES
ANNOUNCER: Please stand for the flag and anthem of the International Military Sports Council [MUSIC].
CARVIN: This is essentially a sporting competition that involves the world’s militaries.
TWIGG: Andy Carvin again.
CARVIN: And there were representatives from many countries, including the United States. And so, as people began grasping at straws to figure out how Wuhan, of all places, might have been the point of origin for coronavirus, the Military World Games became a convenient opportunity to point at a specific instance when there would have been US armed forces representation appearing in Wuhan itself.
MUSIC
KENYON: The American delegation - or so the theory went - might have carried the virus with them, making them super-spreaders. The state-controlled People’s Daily picked up the story. From there, it slipped into foreign media. The Helsinki Times and the New Zealand Herald carried inserts from the People’s Daily that repeated the claim. Part of the reason it had spread from social media to the mainstream press was an army of keyboard warriors in China, whose job it is to amplify Beijing-friendly rhetoric. Kerry Allen, BBC Monitoring’s China expert, has been watching them for years.
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ALLEN: There was what are known as the Wu Mao or 50 Cent Brigade, who were these social media users that are paid by China to write comments on social media in line with Government rhetoric.
KENYON: The 50 Cent Brigade used to target domestic audiences, tweeting in Chinese. But Kerry noticed a change as far back as June 2019, before coronavirus, with an aggressive social media campaign against the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. They were now tweeting in English, directing their comments at a Western audience, just like the Russian so-called bot-farms that we are all so familiar with. If you’d have seen these posts, you’d have thought they were just Chinese patriots, rather than Government-backed agents, but Kerry has learned to read the clues.
ALLEN: So, one of the things that I often see is very serious and very overly formal language. So, like, ‘I resolutely oppose a certain event happening,’ for example, say, in Hong Kong. You wouldn’t see this language from a normal social media user, so they will use this overly formal lingo. And sometimes there will be the same repeated phrases that come up again and again and again.
KENYON: You’d be surprised by who and what they target. Recently, several Chinese accounts have started tweeting their support for Scottish independence. It’s not clear whether this was the 50 Cent Brigade, or bots, or state-controlled accounts, but they appear to be amplifying each other.
MUSIC
TWIGG: This is a song performed by staff of China’s Cyberspace Administration. ‘Internet power!’ it proclaims. ‘Tell the world that the China Dream is lifting up China.’ But, in truth, the agency is more about controlling the internet. Twitter and Facebook are banned in mainland China, but there’s been a storm of social media posts from Chinese accounts on both platforms, written in English as well as Chinese, and calling Covid-19 the America virus or the Trump virus.
MUSIC
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KENYON: I’m looking at what seems to be a spectacular picture of a distant universe - planets surrounded by coloured clouds of tiny stars. It’s actually a data visualisation from a digital investigation into Chinese bots.
STRICK: A lot of people are impressed with data visualisations and specifically network graphs, and they do look pretty cool, especially when you break them down into clusters or networks.
KENYON: Ben Strick is a digital investigator. He wanted to examine whether the Chinese state itself was responsible for spreading disinformation outside the country, much as the Kremlin has done for years. Beijing has always denied involvement, suggesting that these social media accounts are simply patriotic individuals with no state backing. Ben’s task, for the Bellingcat investigative website, was to take a virtual journey through suspicious Chinese Twitter accounts, as the virus continued to spread around the world. He visualises the interactions of users as a party, where people stand around chatting in groups.
STRICK: With a lot of these visualisations, we have a person in the middle and then the cluster around them, and that person in the middle might have been posting a specific tweet or a picture or a graphic, and then we have these other little dots surrounding them as well. They’re usually people that echo the same message. Using that same party metaphor, they would be people that would laugh at that joke that they’re saying in this party. So they would be liking and they would be retweeting and they would be commenting on that joke - ha ha ha. For this example, we’re looking at attacks on democracy, so it’s definitely not a party that’s going here and it’s not just Saturday evening jokes around drinks. These are serious geopolitical issues.
KENYON: His way into the party was by following critical tweets about a controversial Chinese billionaire called Miles Guo, who lives in the US and is a regular target of hate campaigns on social media. Once in, he would find out what else they’d been tweeting.
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STRICK: And so what we start to notice is that this whole network is targeting him, ridiculing him, discrediting him, so that anything that he says is less believable - or that’s the intention anyway of the network. And by looking at that hashtag, so by looking at those people that talk about him, we can also see the other issues that they talk about, such as Hong Kong, for example, and attacking the pro democratic values of the demonstrations that were in Hong Kong at the time, coronavirus in the US, having a look at the great way that China dealt with coronavirus in its own country, which is one of the values of the network as well - supporting the Chinese country and taking down anyone that opposes it or dissents.
KENYON: Ben was convinced that these social media accounts were what he would call inauthentic, operated by bots, not humans. But he needed to know if they were controlled by the Chinese state.
STRICK: We’ve already understood, you know, what’s going on in this room. We know roughly what sort of ideals they have, but we don’t know the people in the room, and that’s when we start to find the light switch and try and turn on and actually have a look at who’s talking about these issues. A lot of these accounts were coming through what Twitter saw as unblocked IP addresses, because Twitter is blocked again in China. So, remembering that Twitter is blocked, when these accounts are accessing an IP address from China on an unblocked account, there is some sort of involvement with the Government in that stage.
MUSIC
KENYON: Ben concludes that what he found was a significant state-backed information operation - what industry insiders call the Spamoflage Dragon - covert Chinese cyber campaigns. Two months later, in June 2020, Twitter stepped in and took down 23,000 accounts that they believed were fronts for the Chinese state.
TWIGG: Victor Gao is a former Chinese diplomat and now professor at Suchou University. He is sceptical that such a disinformation campaign is underway.
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GAU: Give me one single example of falsehood, as you mentioned, coming out of Beijing. I don’t think China has been involved in any kind of falsehoods if you are talking about new media or new social media that’s happening.
TWIGG: So, are you saying that China has not been deploying bots to amplify its message and its perspective or the 50 Cent Brigade?
GAU: I’m not aware of what you are talking about.
MUSIC
KENYON: By 9th March last year, Britain had suffered just eleven coronavirus deaths. We were still a fortnight from our first lockdown and China was about to start performing its most dramatic gear change of the epidemic. It began when a post appeared on the Chinese social media app, Wechat, that tapped into a conspiracy theory whose roots can be found in the Cold War.
TWIGG: The US military base, Fort Detrick, used to host the US biological weapons programme. Its activities are secretive, its premises heavily guarded: all fertile ground for a conspiracy theory.
CARVIN: Fort Detrick as a narrative is particularly fascinating, because it’s been a bogeyman for a very long time, that it was almost inevitable that you would see the conspiracy corners of social media and the conspiracy corners of the internet pointing to Fort Detrick.
TWIGG: Andy Carvin at the Atlantic Council watched as Chinese media began suggesting Fort Detrick might be the source of coronavirus. There had been an outbreak of a flu-like illness nearby, in July 2019, well before the first cases arrived in Wuhan - perhaps there was a link?
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CARVIN: All sorts of crazy ideas came to the fore, because people were grasping at straws or had their individual pet conspiracies they always liked to point to, but some have a slight tinge of rationality to them. We started seeing narratives related to Fort Detrick being planted by multiple sources.
TWIGG: In the spring, China decided to break cover. While retaining its covert cyber operations, Beijing launched an open assault on the western Covid narrative. It had been brewing for months, but at the start of March 2020, China released what some have called the Wolf Warriors.
ALLEN: It goes back to a film in China of the same name Wolf Warrior, and it very much refers to this whole era of Chinese officials now going on the attack.
TWIGG: Kerry Allen from BBC Monitoring has been watching China’s diplomatic corps and its change of tactics. Just two years ago, these so-called Wolf Warriors had almost no presence on Twitter. Now they’re loud and assertive, bickering with the West, deflecting blame and spreading false theories.
ALLEN: It used to be the case in China that diplomats were very diplomatic. They weren’t very powerful with their words. And I think China saw, under President Trump’s leadership, they saw this this offensive in this attack and they wanted to retaliate with it. They wanted to show that they had the capacity for combat.
MUSIC
TWIGG: The Wolf Warrior who has emerged as the leader of the pack looks like anything but a combatant and more like a smart, young entrepreneur from a Silicon Valley start-up. He’s Zhao Lijian from China’s Foreign Ministry. He has tweeted sharp words for the US before, but what he posted one day last March took it to another level.
READER IN STUDIO: When did Patient Zero begin in the US? It might be the US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! The US owes us an explanation! - 11 -
TWIGG: The tweets went viral. Zhao Lijian became a Twitter star.
ALLEN: They liked the idea of a powerful figure like President Trump, someone who could go mano a mano with him. So, yeah, people really liked the idea that Zhao Lijian was so fiery on Twitter all of a sudden, because people hadn’t seen this of Chinese officials before, and he was promoted into the Foreign Ministry, and it’s become clear in recent years that now the Foreign Ministry is going to be a key area for where you’ve got these Wolf Warriors.
TWIGG: Former diplomat Victor Gao, says stories such as Fort Detrick are natural reactions against American provocation.
GAO: The United States Government need to stop the false accusations about China. This has really aroused indignation among the 1.4 billion Chinese people, and I think the Chinese people are fed up with such accusations and vilification and we demand the truth to be told. And the Chinese Government has a job to do - that is to stop the false vilification and accusation by the US Government and several other Western countries’ Governments and focus on what matters most.
KENYON: In a statement to the BBC, the Chinese embassy in London told us that they have ‘never been the one that started provocation’ but that others kept ‘meddling’ in their affairs and ‘smearing China’. As a result, they say, they have ‘no choice but to stand up for themselves, to firmly defend their national interests and dignity.’ They added that, ‘like any other country in the world, the primary duty of China’s diplomacy is to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, as well as dignity.’ Most of us have become used to Russian disinformation on social media. We’re learning how to spot it, as we have the far-right or the anti-vaxxers, or the great 5G conspiracists - but China is different. We might expect it to be bending the truth on Hong Kong, but with coronavirus, there are enough gaps in our understanding of its origins that China’s counter narrative has found some traction in the West. This is the US hip hop superstar, Cardi B, after having watched a China-backed YouTube film about the virus.
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CARDI B: It’s like a little documentary they did in Wuhan. Seeing in Wuhan right now the coronavirus cases are going lower, but that’s because they were knocking on each door, taking people’s temperature …
KENYON: No-one’s certain what she was watching, but the assumption is that it was China’s slick foreign news service, CGTN.
CGTN sting
ANNOUNCER: This is CGTN - China Global Television Network.
KENYON: Just like its social media, China’s television propaganda used to be purely domestic, but this too has changed in recent years. CGTN is similar to Russia Today, aimed at a multi-channel audience looking for an alternative to the Western liberal narrative on world events. If you scroll through its website, there are stories about Manchester United and Chinese movie stars, but among them are short films about the origins of Covid - and Fort Detrick.
EXTRACT FROM CGTN NEWS
MAN: It was here where five residents have died following an outbreak of respiratory illness that began in the summer of 2019.
KENYON: One of its senior journalists agreed to speak to me anonymously about the state-led editorial control he experiences every day, played out through a hierarchy of checks and balances.
INSIDER: Here at CGTN, you actually go through six layers, which are called three checks and three corrections, to make sure every single layer is agreed. And if one, say, layer three doesn’t agree with layer four or vice versa, then it will go back to layer two or they will ask you to change your copy again. Sometimes it can go through seven or eight layers when it comes to President Xi. - 13 -
KENYON: Is the pressure from the Chinese State Propaganda Department to adopt a particular line, or do people just know organically, if you like, because they’ve become aware of it over a period of time?
INSIDER: There’s never a clear lie heard from the very top that you have to write things like this, things like that, but since everyone knows it’s led by the Chinese Communist Party and every single week you will have a meeting, and in that meeting you will have to learn what President Xi or what the CPC - the Government - has been calling for, for the next stage of our country.
KENYON: What would happen if somebody in those layers of changes in corrections made a mistake or they refused to correct something?
INSIDER: So, if your leaders think you’re wrong and want to give you a chance to realise what you’ve done wrong, then they would say, ‘Write me a few thousand words of self-reflection.’ In the self-reflection you have to reflect where you have gone wrong so the next time you won’t do it again.
KENYON: Our insider says that many of the CGTN journalists have worked in Western media, but even they soon lose their grip on what is state-sponsored disinformation.
INSIDER: Most of my friends, you know my friend circles, who work in different places in China and outside China and in big cities and small cities, a lot of them believe that the virus is from the US.
MUSIC
KENYON: We asked the Chinese embassy in London about blaming America for the coronavirus. They said that ‘origin tracing is a complex, scientific issue’ and that ‘quite a number of reports and studies have shown that infections broke out in multiple places in the world in the latter half of 2019.’ They reiterate their view that the World Health Organisation should visit other countries to conduct origin-tracing studies.
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KENYON cont: By December last year, the next stage of China’s battle to shape the coronavirus narrative began. It would be not about the origins of the virus, but about Western-manufactured vaccines.
TWIGG: Just like with the origins of Covid, this became a tit for tat. The effectiveness of China’s own vaccines was questioned in the West, and China hit back. Sinovac was ‘much safer’ than the UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine, some reports said, and claims that the Pfizer and Moderna shots were risky were boosted by state media and officials.
KENYON: In the UK, among Oxford’s dreaming spires, Professor Phillip Howard at the Oxford Internet Institute was watching China’s vaccine narrative unfold.
HOWARD: The thing that they have learned is that the goal of a large misinformation campaign isn’t to plant one counter narrative, but to plant multiple counter narratives, so to plant multiple stories, sometimes they’re equally ridiculous. So suddenly, over the course of a week, ten thousand new accounts will appear, putting out one particular kind of story. They won’t have pictures and then they they’ll have numbers instead of names, and there’s just a different scale. They try to do things overnight.
KENYON: This was more like one of the Kremlin’s anarchic disinformation campaigns. Remember, this is about scientifically proven Western vaccines, with potentially life-threatening consequences if the rumour spreads and people are too afraid to have an injection in the UK and Europe. Professor Howard has found astonishing evidence of how Chinese vaccine stories have been amplified around the world and have made their way into all our homes.
HOWARD: Over the last six months, articles by Chinese state media outlets have been touching upon vaccines and shared or retweeted more than 100,000 times on Facebook and Twitter, and these are articles that produce millions of engagements, millions of likes, hundreds of thousands of comments, so people in the West are engaging with this content.
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KENYON: Whilst vaccine misinformation can have an immediately destructive effect, there’s a more subtle, long-term influence that some believe China has been trying to exert. It involves a platform directed at teenagers around the world.
TWIGG: TikTok is a video-sharing platform used by millions of youngsters from Birmingham and London to LA and Reykjavik. The platform is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. You might not have heard of it, but in 2018 it became the world’s most valuable start-up. It is a fun place to make dancing and lip-syncing videos. Because of TikTok’s connection to China, there have been fears in the West that Beijing might be using it to spread propaganda. In 2018, ByteDance was recruiting thousands of content moderators to try and appease the Chinese Government after a crackdown on one of its other apps. One of those they wanted to hire was Eric Liu, a former content reviewer for Sina Weibo - China’s Twitter-like platform, who eventually fled to the US.
LIU: Back in 2018, ByteDance tried but failed to recruit me. At that time, the HR manager told me specifically that they are going to censor TikTok from China. The office I went for the interview was located on the 17th floor, in a luxurious high- rise building in Tianjin. The HR manager met me outside and took me in, walked through several passages inside the building, like going through a maze, and also warned me not to look around. It felt like I was in the drug dealer’s den. This shows how strict they treat confidentiality. ByteDance’s confidentiality measures on the 17th floor of the building were due to fear of foreign media.
TWIGG: Tiktok say things have changed significantly since 2018. They have recruited a global Head of Trust and Safety, who is based in Ireland. They add that TikTok does not operate in China, TikTok content is not moderated in China and TikTok does not moderate content based on political sensitivity, and any suggestion to the contrary is false. Then, in 2019, one viral video seemed to add to the suspicions.
EXTRACT FROM TIKTOK
HOST: So the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes obviously, then you’re going to put them down and use your phone
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HOST cont: that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China, how they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there.
TWIGG: Halfway through, the host switches topic, urging viewers to research human rights abuses in China. The make-up tutorial was criticising China for its treatment of Uighur people. The account was temporarily banned and the video was briefly taken down. The suspicion was this was censorship and it made headlines around the world. TikTok explained the banning was because the account holder had broken moderation rules in other videos and this video was taken down, they said, because of human moderation error. TikTok says the cases cited are several years old, and since then TikTok’s approach has changed significantly. But the concerns didn’t go away.
EXTRACT FROM CNBC
REPORTER: Now just last week, Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton called for a national security probe of the company on concerns about its collection of user data and the possibility of Chinese-directed censorship of content on the platform.
TWIGG: TikTok’s critics have yet to find hard evidence of Chinese influence on the platform, although researchers are still trying to get to grips with the algorithm. Victor Gao, the former Chinese diplomat you heard from earlier, also dismisses any suggestion the platform could be influenced by China.
GAO: I think there is no connection at all between the Chinese Government with platforms like TikTok. Why? Because the platforms cater to the internet users who are relatively young - in their teens, for example, especially - and they spread news and their life stories very much unrelated to anything political or ideologically related at all.
MUSIC
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KENYON: There is one way, though, that China might be trying to shape the world narrative in a profound manner, with a technology that could cause a global split in everything we see and do. At Oxford Information labs, Emily Taylor believes Beijing might be creating its own alternative internet, a complete rebuilding from the ground up - the creation of its own, competing cyber space - what some call the Splinternet.
TAYLOR: This is not about improving on the existing in a compatible and interoperable and open way, but on creating a different type of vision, a different architecture. It appears to be that it would be Government-controlled operators who would be able to look at the granular level of different messages and throw people off the network if necessary. It might present an opportunity to manage civil unrest or other contentious incidents. The new architecture that is being proposed by China would enable internet shutdowns much more readily.
KENYON: You might wonder why it matters. Well, it’s unlikely that the new Splinternet would be confined to just China.
TAYLOR: China has been incredibly generous with sub-Saharan Africa, for example, in building out infrastructure in a way that the West hasn’t really been able to compete with, and so it may be that some countries end up with this kind of internet because it’s part of an aid package and that’s just what they receive and they don’t really have much choice in the matter.
KENYON: The Western internet has evolved over three short decades, fire-fighting as it went, learning how to police itself, how to remain open and democratic, whilst guarding itself from criminality and abuse - not always successfully, of course. China’s advantage is that it’s learned from that, from the mistakes and the costly wrong-turns, and can launch a robust, China-compliant alternative.
TAYLOR: If you view this entire architecture as a way of protecting a regime or a particular way of thinking from other messy realities, you end up with a medium where one particular state sponsored message gets to everybody in an uncluttered way. The alternative is a world where there are many truths, many contested
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TAYLOR cont: versions of reality, and it’s up to the individual then to make their own decision about what they choose to believe.
MUSIC
KENYON: The pandemic has seen us bombarded with these contested versions of reality; state-sponsored narratives that seep into our lives without us even noticing. Russia led the way, but China’s potential for influence is far deeper and long- lasting. If Russian disinformation is like a spell of bad weather, China’s is more like permanent climate change - you’re likely to see much more of it.