FPI / October 9, 2024
Communist regime leaders in Beijing have apparently, with a boost from artificial intelligence (AI), overcome earlier fears about social media at home and are deploying it in the United States in a comprehensive information war against its enemy.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese military have employed AI to augment the impact of its propaganda and influence operations using American social media platforms, according to a new Rand study.
China’s leaders have embraced the use of Facebook and X as key tools influencing foreign public opinion, the study said.
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers have in particular studied how to use social media to influence the outcome of U.S. elections. Rand’s study said the methods highlighted by U.S. intelligence officials were China’s efforts to influence the 2022 midterm elections by using social media to magnify divisions in the U.S.
“This broader PLA view of the evolving nature of warfare and the desire to embrace emerging technologies is driving PLA researchers to develop a new operational concept, cognitive domain operations,” the report said.
The study is based on an in-depth review of Chinese party and military writings that analyze the goals of information warfare, what the PLA is calling the “Three Warfares” — public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare.
The study highlights the work of Li Bicheng, who is described as China’s leading military information warfare researcher. Li, who specializes in cyber-enabled influence operations, is leading the Chinese military into adopting AI to run large-scale networks of automated bots to influence both domestic and foreign public opinion.
The PLA plans to expand the use of more sophisticated bots for waging “public opinion struggle,” along with propaganda bots, follower bots and “roadblock bots,” the study said.
The PLA has already been detected using the generative AI system ChatGPT with a cyber group known as Spamouflage. PLA researchers also are using other U.S. open-source AI models, the Rand report said.
AI will also help improve the efficiency of current Chinese campaigns called “astroturfing” — deception operations intended to promote the false impression of widespread public support for an issue.
“On the basis of cracking the enemy’s ability to verify the account information for social bots, the social bot will complete public opinion struggle and intelligence-collection tasks, such as predicting the attributes of artificial users, analyzing their social behavior network, destroying the enemy’s opinion leaders, speeding up the dissemination of the enemy’s redundant content, burying its effective information, comprehensively disrupting the enemy’s information order, intensifying its internal contradictions, and causing a strong large-scale effect,” Li is quoted in the report as saying.
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