The websites copied design elements in order to fraudulently present themselves as such outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and others. Aside from commercial and pro-China content, they also ran articles attacking Falun Gong, a faith group brutally persecuted by the regime of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the report said.
“We identified evidence that these companies and/or individuals leveraged these domains in contracts to promote the activities undertaken by [CCP-linked] entities,” the report said.
This tactic fits into the broader campaign waged by Beijing against the Falun Gong diaspora overseas, according to Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit that monitors the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong.
“This is not simply online disinformation. The campaign we see today is a blueprint for how a hostile influence operation run by Beijing can launder propaganda through fake ‘news’ brands and then use coordinated inauthentic accounts to push it into Western information ecosystems,” Browde said in a statement.
The CCP set out to eradicate Falun Gong in 1999 after government surveys revealed that between 70 million and 100 million Chinese had adopted the practice, which consists of slow-moving exercises and spiritual teachings based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance....