Coronavirus: Chinese agents stoked panic in US by spreading fake warnings, officials tell New York Times
- Report says operatives helped spread messages claiming Trump administration would deploy national guard to enforce nationwide quarantine
- Beijing has denied broader claims that it is involved in misinformation campaigns
Chinese agents tried to spread panic across the US in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic by pushing fake text messages to Americans’ mobile phones and social media accounts, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The article was based on interviews with six American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The findings appear to represent an escalation by foreign powers like Russia and China in trying to capitalise on the panic surrounding the pandemic to sow confusion in the US, and intelligence agencies are taking a new look at how operatives may have exploited the situation.
The report said the recent effort was especially alarming to intelligence officials because the disinformation appeared as text messages on Americans’ mobile phones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before.
Messages like this one, which claimed to come from a source in the US Department of Homeland Security, were commonplace in the early days of the pandemic:
