According to a new report from The Washington Post, China is tapping Western social media to provide its military and police with information about foreign targets. This revelation came after reviewing hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company documents.
The new report claims that China has a nationwide data monitoring service network that has been developed in the past decade to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.
The software is aimed at domestic Internet users and media, and also collects data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and other Western social media. Documents visited by the Washington-based publication also showed that Chinese institutions, including the official media, the Ministry of Propaganda, the police, the military, and network regulators are buying new or more complex systems to collect data.
The report pointed out that China’s official media software programs mine Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and scholars.
The report further revealed that an intelligence project of the Beijing police analyzed Western content about Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also cataloged Uyghur content abroad. “Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing analyst who works in a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department.
According to the report, the department was responsible for producing a data report on how negative content related to Beijing’s top leaders was spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual scholars, politicians, and journalists.
Mareike Ohlberg, a senior researcher at the German Marshall Fund, quoted the German Marshall Fund as saying: “They are now adjusting part of their efforts outwards. Frankly speaking, this is terrible. Look at the huge volume and scale that this brings within China.” The Washington Post. She added: “This does show that they now feel that it is their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight public opinion overseas.”
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