Protests give Russia, China, Iran fuel to exploit US divide
An article on a fake online news outlet that Meta has linked to Russia’s information operations attributed the clashes unfolding on U.S. college campuses to the failures of the Biden administration. A newspaper controlled by the Communist Party of China said the police crackdowns exposed the “double standards and hypocrisy” in the United States when it comes to free speech.
On social platform X, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Kanaani, posted a cartoon of police arresting a young protester in the guise of the Statue of Liberty. “Imprisonment of #freedom in the U.S.A.,” he wrote.
As protests over the war in the Gaza Strip have spread across the United States, Russia, China and Iran have seized on them to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the U.S., according to researchers who have identified both overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests since they began.
There is little evidence – at least so far – that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests, the way Russia recruited unwitting Black Lives Matter protesters to stage rallies before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
Nonetheless, the campaigns have portrayed the U.S. as a country rived by social and political turmoil. In the past two weeks alone, state media in Russia, China and Iran have produced nearly 400 articles in English about the protests, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation online. The countries have also unleashed a wave of content through inauthentic accounts or bots on X and Telegram or websites created, in Russia’s case, to mimic Western news organizations.
“It’s a wound that our adversaries are going to try to spread salt on because they can,” said Darren Linvill, a director of the Media Forensics
Hub at Clemson University, which has identified campaigns by all three countries. “The more we fight amongst ourselves, the easier their life is and the more they can get away with.”
Researchers are concerned that some foreign influence operations are also pivoting toward the presidential election in November, seeking to inflame partisan tensions, denigrate democracy and promote isolationism. All three adversaries have unleashed a deluge of propaganda and disinformation since the war over Gaza began in October, seeking to undercut Israel and, as its principal ally, the United States while expressing support for Hamas or the Palestinians generally.
The campus protests, which gained momentum in recent weeks, have allowed them to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel, arguing that it has undermined its international standing while not reflecting popular sentiment at home.
“The policies of the Biden administration are complicating the situation inside the country,” the article on TruthGate, one of a handful of websites that Meta said last year were created by a Russian information operation known as Doppelgänger to spread propaganda under the guise of a U.S. news outlet, said Wednesday. “In the rush to help our controversial allies, they have completely forgotten about domestic affairs. Now the situation seems irreparable.”
The influence efforts have been tracked by researchers at Clemson and NewsGuard, as well as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Recorded Futures, an online research company.