How China will use Disinformation as a Kinetic Effector in the next war
It's way worse than you think
I want on the Not A Gray Man Podcast to talk to RK Gray about China, disinformation, and how we can fight it.
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How can you tell the difference between Chinese disinformation and modern American journalism? Does it matter? If Forbes posts a story given to them by a troll and then retracts it a day later, does that really make them better or less damaging than the Chinese?
Ryan, love your work. Something that has been bothering me for a long time that I would like your take on:
What interest does the Chinese Communist Party have in influencing local politics?
I am from Seattle, WA, infamous for the CHOP/CHAZ fiasco in 2020. We have a local anti-police blogger here that appears to at have recruited a few independent journalists to his cause.
I am all for the right to critize government, especially the police. The issue is that this blog is founded by a man who spent significant time in China, writing for a English language version of the People's Daily.
Some of his reporting is accurate, but not much. The overall tenor of his reporting is to embellish the truth for outrage (easy to do when involving police). It is intentionally divisive, you would think that the people of this city were the equivalent of Kurdish villagers being VX gassed by Saddam Hussein the way they talk about CS gas being used during civil unrest in 2020. I digress. Unsurprisingly, he also spends a significant amount of time posting about the Israel/Hamas conflict.
My questions are:
#1: Do you believe someone like this is acting independently? I think it's possible that he is acting of his own free-will, but the CCP connection is seems facially nefarious. It definitely seems like this falls under a broad strategy of promoting internal division in the US even if it's not necessarily about foreign policy.
#2: Is there any kinetic benefit to promoting division at the local level? Raising the temperature of civil unrest in a city sucks for the people living there, but it didn't seem to impact the things China would want to impact in our region: major ports, aerospace manufacturing, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, airlift command, cyber capabilities, etc.