Chinese influence operation urged Spaniards to 'overthrow the government', intelligence firm claims
The Chinese state-linked campaign — dubbed "Spamouflage" by analysts — posed as the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders on social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok and X to circulate content criticising the government's response to the floods that killed at least 225 people last October, found a report by the US-based firm.
Spamouflage has used thousands of accounts to spam content across at least 50 websites, forums and social media platforms in recent years, with its targets ranging from US voters to Canadian lawmakers, according to analysts from both Graphika and the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
However, this latest campaign marks the first time that the Beijing-linked operation has directly called for the overthrow of a foreign government, according to Graphika's Chief Intelligence Officer Jack Stubbs.
"This activity shows Chinese online influence operations are becoming more aggressive in their attempts to manipulate domestic political conversations in Western countries and undermine Beijing's critics," he told Euronews.
The Chinese embassy in Madrid and the Spanish government could not be immediately reached for comment.
Graphika said it had identified dozens of social media accounts posting content in both English and Spanish that purported to show Safeguard Defenders condemning the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the regional administration of Valencia's leader Carlos Mazón.
The key post in the campaign was a video — overlaid with the Safeguard Defenders' logo — in which a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and claiming to be with the NGO said they wanted to "expose" authorities for giving up on normal people. The video, which was posted on X but has since been removed, ends with a call to topple the government.
Graphika also flagged content that had misspelled Mazón's name as "Carlos Ma Song," which analysts said was most likely a Chinese transliteration.
'Sustained attack'
The campaign was almost certainly intended to discredit Safeguard Defenders, which Spamouflage has repeatedly targeted after the NGO accused the Chinese government of running police stations overseas in EU countries in 2022, according to Graphika.
Laura Harth, a director at Safeguard Defenders who focuses on China, said the NGO had been under a "renewed multi-lingual and sustained attack" aimed at casting doubt on its work since publishing its research into the secret Chinese police stations in 2022.
"Since last summer, we have definitely seen an increase in the creativity, technical expertise and resources dedicated to this campaign against us," she told Euronews.
Spamouflage has targeted several countries since 2017, but ramped up its activities last year ahead of November's US presidential election and impersonated American voters in a bid to influence political conversations around the vote, Graphika said in September.
In response, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman at the Chinese embassy in Washington, rejected Graphika's findings as full of "prejudice and malicious speculation" and said that Beijing would not interfere in the US election.
In October 2023, the Canadian government said the operation had left thousands of comments spreading disinformation and propaganda on the social media accounts of several MPs, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A Meta report from August 2023 described Spamouflage as "the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world" and said it had links to Chinese law enforcement.
Compared with conventional warfare or economic sanctions, online influence operations are seen by malicious state actors alike as a cheap and low-risk way to hurt geopolitical adversaries by undermining trust among citizens in their governments, analysts say.
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