As the midterms approach, President Donald Trump has purported that China may be interfering in the election. Trump has been making pretty explicit claims, without significant supporting evidence, including when he addressed the United Nations Security Council last month, saying, "China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election, coming up in November, against my administration.”
These claims came pretty much out of nowhere, as Trump otherwise focused on a series of allegations against Iran.
He has a long history of paranoia involving China, as displayed on his Twitter feed:
Vice President Mike Pence has been following suit. One week after Trump’s claims to the U.N., Pence had accusations of his own. “There can be no doubt: China is meddling in America’s democracy,” he said. He went on to declare that it has been “an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading into the 2020 presidential elections.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Facebook nor Twitter has any record of this “unprecedented effort.” Company officials claim they have not found any indication that election interference activity is coming from China. On the other hand, both social media sites report that they have found campaigns that appear to originate in both Russia and Iran. But as press representatives confirmed to Bloomberg, there is nothing yet from China. Of course, it’s possible that Chinese activity is happening, and that it hasn’t been detected yet. Or that activity could happen closer to the election. But right now, Trump’s comments feel like a distraction more than anything else.
Outside of social media, cybersecurity firms FireEye, CrowdStrike, and Symantec all determined that China is not trying to interfere with the midterms.
Both Trump and Pence fall back on one piece of evidence for their claims. In the Des Moines Register, the biggest newspaper in Iowa, there is an ad supplement, placed by the Chinese government, that does critique the Trump administration’s trade policies.
Trump tweeted about this ad:
The choice to group China’s “interference” with Russia’s is intentionally misleading. Russian interference in the 2016 election has left people feeling skeptical, if not entirely distrustful. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have made efforts to detect (and ideally, stop) disinformation campaigns from foreign governments. How do they do this? By having people review suspicious activity that may be linked to coordinated campaigns. They also rely on some automated algorithms. Peter Singer, a military analyst, told Vice News, “[China] is clearly active in traditional cyber security hacking of intellectual property and the like, but trying to frame what Russia and China are doing as the same thing, that is misinformation.There is this attempt for a variety of domestic, political reasons to portray them as somehow the same, and it is just bullshit.”
Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, rejected Trump’s claims of interference, saying, “China has all along followed the principle of non-interference. We did not and will not interfere in any country’s domestic affairs. We refuse to accept any unwarranted accusations against China.”
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