COVID-19 conspiracy’s vast reach
Multinational battle to control origin’s narrative
BRUSSELS – It took just three months for the rumor that COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon to spread from the fringes of the Chinese internet and take root in millions of people’s minds.
By March 2020, belief that the virus had been human-made and possibly weaponized was widespread, multiple surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that one in three Americans believed the new coronavirus had been created in a lab; one in four thought it had been engineered intentionally.
This chaos was, at least in part, manufactured.
Powerful forces, from Beijing and Washington to Moscow and Tehran, have battled to control the narrative about where the virus came from. Leading officials and allied media in all four countries functioned as super-spreaders of disinformation, using their stature to sow doubt and amplify politically expedient conspiracies already in circulation, a nine-month Associated Press investigation of state-sponsored disinformation conducted in collaboration with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. The analysis was based on a review of millions of social media postings and articles on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram and other platforms.
As the pandemic swept the world, it was China – not Russia – that took the lead in spreading foreign disinformation about COVID-19’s origins.
Beijing was reacting to weeks of fiery rhetoric from leading U.S. Republicans, including then-President Donald Trump, who sought to rebrand COVID-19 as “the China virus.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Beijing has worked to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces seeking to politicize the pandemic.
“All parties should firmly say ‘no’ to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement to AP, but added, “In the face of trumped-up charges, it is justified and proper to bust lies and clarify rumors by setting out the facts.”
The day after the World Health Organization designated the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shot off a series of latenight tweets that launched what may be the party’s first truly global digital experiment with overt disinformation.
Chinese diplomats have only recently mobilized on Western social media platforms, more than tripling their Twitter accounts and more than doubling their Facebook accounts since late 2019. Both platforms are banned in China.
“When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao tweeted on March 12. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe (sic) us an explanation!”
What happened next showcases the power of China’s global messaging machine.
On Twitter alone, Zhao’s aggressive
spray of 11 tweets on March 12 and 13 was cited over 99,000 times over the next six weeks, in at least 54 languages, according to analysis conducted by DFRLab. The accounts that referenced him had nearly 275 million followers on Twitter – a number that almost certainly includes duplicate followers and does not distinguish fake accounts.
Influential conservatives on Twitter, including Donald Trump Jr., hammered Zhao, propelling his tweets to their largest audiences.
China’s Global Times and at least 30 Chinese diplomatic accounts, from France to Panama, rushed in to support Zhao. Venezuela’s foreign minister and RT’s correspondent in Caracas, as well as Saudi accounts close to the kingdom’s royal family also significantly extended Zhao’s reach, helping launch his ideas into Spanish and Arabic.
His accusations got uncritical treatment in Russian and Iranian state media and shot back through QAnon discussion boards. But his biggest audience, by far, lay within China itself – despite the fact that Twitter is banned there. Popular hashtags about his tweetstorm were viewed 314 million times on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, which does not distinguish unique views.
Late on the night of March 13, Zhao posted a message of gratitude on his personal Weibo: “Thank you for your support to me, let us work hard for the motherland!”
China leaned on Russian disinformation strategy and infrastructure, turning to an established network of Kremlin proxies to seed and spread messaging. In January, Russian state media were the first to legitimize the theory that the U.S. engineered the virus as a weapon. Russian politicians soon joined the chorus.
“One was amplifying the other . ... How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia.
Iran also jumped in. The same day Zhao tweeted that the virus might have come from the U.S. Army, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced COVID-19 could be the result of a biological attack. He would later cite that conspiracy to justify refusing COVID-19 aid from the U.S.
Ten days after Zhao’s first conspiratorial tweets, China’s global state media apparatus kicked in.
“Did the U.S. government intentionally conceal the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” asked a suggestive op-ed in Mandarin published by China Radio International on March 22. “Why was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, shut down in July 2019?”
Within days, versions of the piece appeared more than 350 times in Chinese state outlets, mostly in Mandarin, but also around the world in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic, AP found.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told AP it resolutely opposes spreading conspiracy theories. “We have not done it before and will not do it in the future,” the ministry said in a statement. “False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and spread of false information.”
WASHINGTON – Bill Gates is an optimist when it comes to climate change.
The Microsoft co-founder and global health philanthropist said the past four years have been a wasted opportunity to combat the threat of a warming planet and U.S. leadership on the issue waned under Donald Trump.
But he said achieving President Joe Biden’s ambitious goals of decarbonizing the energy sector by 2035 and attaining net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is within reach. That is, if clean energy storage and transmission challenges are met, next-generation nuclear power remains part of the portfolio, and the federal government ramps up investment in research and development of carbon-neutral building materials to make them far less expensive.
“My goal is to say we need a plan,” Gates told USA TODAY during a recent interview. “People who think a plan is easy are wrong. People who think a plan is impossible are wrong. It’s super hard and very broad, but it’s doable.”
Gates wrote a new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” detailing his ideas for addressing a crisis that experts say is causing temperatures to increase, sea levels to rise and natural disasters to grow more frequent and intense. The book goes on sale Tuesday.
In a wide-ranging interview, the billionaire investor talked about how the “easy stuff,” such as electric cars and the first part of clean energy generation, has largely been achieved. He said the focus must be on finding ways to reduce the carbon footprint of the agricultural and industrial sectors, such as developing a “green” process of manufacturing cement
and steel that’s affordable.
The co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which spends billions on global health initiatives, spoke with USA TODAY about climate change. The following is a lightly edited transcript of what he had to say:
Question: Will your work on the climate rival your foundation’s investment in global health in terms of scope, magnitude and resources?
Answer: No, the dollars on global health are substantially higher. I’ve spent a couple billion on climate things. I’ll spend at least a couple billion more, but it won’t be on the scale of our global health work.
Q: President Biden issued several executive orders on climate change last month to rejoin the Paris treaty, prioritize science-based policy across federal agencies and pause oil drilling on public lands to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Is this enough?
A: He’s doing the right things, but we still do not have a plan. When you look at the R&D spending for things like steel or cement inside the U.S. government, it’s tiny because the Energy Department never thought of themselves as the “How do you make steel?” “How do you make cement?” “How do you avoid cow methane?” Department. And we’re dramatically short on R&D.
Q: You never mention President Donald Trump in your book. How much did his climate denial and efforts to ignore the crisis set back the country’s ability to meet the ambitious milestones you believe the planet needs to achieve?
A: When you’re going around trying to raise money for vaccines for poor countries, everyone’s like “Where’s the U.S.?” And it’s the same on climate. The last four years, there has been some progress but, without the U.S., completely inadequate. And I don’t think our biggest problems are denialists. The two factions I worry the most about are people who say, “Hey, that’s there, but it’s too expensive. It just hurts too much.” And then the people who think it’s easy like we can solve this in 10 years. That’s no more scientific than denying that climate change doesn’t exist.
In your book, you talk about the need for the federal government to play a key role in climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions and helping the clean energy sector grow. But haven’t the past four years shown us how unreliable government can be as a partner and that the private sector is better off solving this problem directly?
A: Well, without government, we won’t succeed. If you take a product like green steel, there is no green steel, because the green premium is so very very high. And you know you need all the power of the universities and the national labs to come together on doing a piece of work like that. You know one of the approaches involves clean hydrogen, but those projects are very expensive, and they’re just not economic today, so I’m not sure if there’s a way that private sector solves a problem like that.
Q: What promising new technologies do you think can best address climate change?
A: Sadly, no single technology is going to be enough. But I really am seeing some fantastic examples from breakthrough energy of things that seem kind of amazing . ... There’s a company called Quidnet. They pressurize water and push it underground. And that’s a way of storing energy that can be done almost anywhere in the country.
Q: You mentioned the importance of energy storage.
A: One of the dilemmas in climate is that these intermittent sources like wind and solar can be shut down for long periods of time. Like when there’s a typhoon over Japan or a cold front over the Midwest of the United States, you get even up to a couple weeks where wind and solar wouldn’t be generating hardly anything. And, you know, the batteries we have today, they’re getting good enough for cars, but they have to be about 20 times better than that to work in this bad weather, seasonal intermittency where people still expect to get electricity.
Many Americans still view nuclear power as unsafe or not environmental because of the waste it produces. Can we reach the net-zero targets we’re talking about without nuclear power.
Well, there’s basically three ways to deal with the reliability of the electric system. One is to have a miracle in energy storage. If we don’t get the miracle, the only two sources of high scale, 24hour electricity would be nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is early enough along that it’s very unlikely it can be a big part of the 2050 solution. And so, at least maintaining investments in nuclear fission, which generates about 20% of U.S. electricity. I think that’s wise.