How China is attempting to influence US elections
China is increasingly its espionage and infiltration techniques against the US in the lead up to the November 2024 election. 2430 Group summarizes some of the CCP’s most prominent techniques.
The US has accused China of attempting to interfere in US elections since 2016. Over the past decade, China has enhanced its capacity to influence foreign elections through a combination of targeted disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, economic coercion, and the use of proxies to spread pro-China messages through legacy and social media platforms. While the degree to which these efforts affect votes is unclear, collectively they point to a broad effort to disrupt the election process, sow distrust among voters about outcomes, and promote extreme candidates over moderate alternatives. As the Director of National Intelligence notes, “China is using AI in broader influence operations seeking to shape global views of China and amplify divisive U.S. political issues, but not for any specific operations targeting U.S. election outcomes.” Ultimately, China’s ambition is to use the US’s open society to undermine the political process, create and exacerbate internal divisions, and thereby hinder the US’s capacity to compete with China on the world stage.
Mis/Disinformation Campaigns
Chinese disinformation is extensive and has expanded rapidly into new markets in the past decade. While the CCP denies disinformation and hacking interference in other countries, evidence clearly shows that this is a favored technique by the CCP to disrupt its adversaries. Moreover, hacking and disinformation are both central to how China’s People’s Liberation Army conducts information warfare. Disinformation is often targeted at socially disruptive stories that portray the US as failing and that trigger intense emotional reactions among viewers, particularly those on the political far right. Chinese disinformation, for example, is overwhelmingly pro-Trump not because of a preference for Donald Trump per se, but because CCP officials see support for Trump as more likely to stoke social unrest in the US. Attempts to combat these mis/disinformation campaigns are currently sparsely resourced, and targeted individuals are often unaware that the content they consume is foreign government propaganda.
Recently, China has embraced AI-generated content to both produce disinformation abroad and to defend against disinformation at home. Chinese propagandists have honed the techniques and technologies involved in this content production through experimentation, particularly when targeting Taiwan. Taiwan’s recent presidential election, for example, was “the first time that Microsoft Threat Intelligence witnessed a nation-state actor using AI content in attempts to influence a foreign election.” State-backed hacking groups active in targeting Taiwan favor AI-generated memes and videos.
While Taiwan receives much of China’s overseas disinformation efforts, Beijing is applying lessons from Taiwan around the world. Companies like Microsoft have documented attempts by Chinese actors to exploit AI or AI-enhanced content to sow distrust abroad, including in the US. In particular, reports by Microsoft detail how Chinese agents target foreign democracies using fake social media accounts to poll voters about what divides them most, and then exploiting that information using generative AI content. Through “Spamoflague” campaigns, which aim to mimic US voters in an attempt to persuade others into adopting similar policy positions–most of which are pro-Trump–Chinese government and security agents are widespread on most social media platforms.
Notably, an annual assessment by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in March 2024 pointed out that Chinese intelligence and propaganda institutions frequently use the app to spread pro-China disinformation and interfere in US elections.
Espionage and Pressure Campaigns
Beyond traditional diplomatic efforts to persuade US policymakers and promote favorable positions on China among legislators, China also uses a combination of economic and political pressures to influence political outcomes. In particular, China weaponizes cyber espionage by a range of individuals and private sector actors against targeted governments, corporations, and individuals. In one recent example, a recent data leak from a private hacking company backed by the Chinese government, iSoon, suggests that the price tags associated with different espionage products include $100,000 for access to software that runs disinformation campaigns and hack accounts on X (formally Twitter), or $278,000 for personal information from social media platforms like Telegram and Facebook.
As Norway’s spy agencies recently announced, Chinese espionage is widespread, innovative, and largely conducted by intermediaries like Chinese companies, organizations, think tanks, and academic institutions. This targeting goes beyond attacks against dissidents of Chinese dissent to include broader attempts to undermine social unrest in the US and to potentially recruit individuals to conduct covert operations within the US government on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, as evidenced by similar cases in Germany, the UK, and in the New York state government. Using proxies, including influence groups or lobbying organizations, is therefore an increasingly common tactic for Chinese influence operations. This suggests that China’s influence in US elections is therefore less about cyber hacking of voting machines or other explicit actions, but rather more about influencing the electorate through disinformation, relying on surrogates like political aides, or through pressure campaigns against individual politicians.
