Disinformation, foreign state interference and local communities (2)

Part 2 – divide and conquer

The COVID-19 pandemic opened a lid on today’s information environment. For the first time many people became aware of the breadth of conspiracies and disinformation – often aired by armchair pundits but countless times initiated by malign foreign state actors^[1].  With the pandemic lifting the lid we could see the impact of disinformation on our daily lives and, more starkly, the febrile information environment in which we now live. Willing participants or not.

Since China’s admittance into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 there has been an acceleration of Chinese moving to nations within South America.  Peru has the largest Chinese diaspora community of about one million people, or five percent of the population^[2]. With the pandemic China took advantage of its growing diaspora communities and the high use of social media across South America. 

In November 2021 the highly respected think tank Chatham House released a new report looking at Latin America^[3]. The report focussed on how misinformation, disinformation and propaganda were disseminated by foreign state media and how they were consumed by Latin American audiences. Chatham House looked at traditional and social media agents engaged in disinformation and then monitored their efforts to influence civil society, the media and local national governments. During their research they established the extent, nature and objectives of foreign state media in Latin American and how information is spread wittingly and unwittingly across a number of topics of choice. 

Rather than creating social dysfunction out of nothing, the report highlights that disinformation is used to magnify and amplify existing fault lines and tensions. The costs of these campaigns were measurable and impactful, particularly with regards to attitudes and discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic. China and Russia are identified by the report as the predominant nations disseminating disinformation across South America. The central pillar of the narrative promoted by China was the idea that the CCP led government is better placed to address the challenges of the pandemic than liberal democracies. 

Having laid foundations during the pandemic, China has continued to spread post-Covid narratives across Latin America and developing world.  In Ecuador, according to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report published in September 2021^[4], Chinese industrial participants extend their influence by working through local actors and institutions while adapting and assimilating local and traditional forms, norms and practices. Here the report sets out how China’s operatives overcame negative reputation through a campaign of divide and conquer. 

Under Chinese proprietorship, mining operations that should have contributed to Ecuador’s development have been progressed at odds to local interests. Having faced challenges created by strong local opposition, particularly among impacted Indigenous communities, the major Chinese mining consortium that control’s Ecuador’s two main copper mines protected their investment through a multi-layered approach. This included co-opting local figures, colluding with national officials to sidestep environmental and sociocultural safeguards and coercing inhabitants into relocating under threat of force. The report highlights the damaging lasting impact of this Chinese approach to securing its desired mining assets: “By turning Ecuadorian national elites against locals and using divide-and-conquer tactics among Indigenous communities, the Chinese-led mining projects have entrenched existing political cleavages, have undermined community cohesion, and ultimately have harmed Ecuador’s democratic fabric, especially the standing of civil society and Indigenous rights organizations.”

Early this summer MIT’s Technology Journal picked up a study by Mandiant, a division of Google, drawing attention to an online influence campaign targeting Western companies that mine and process rare-earth elements^[5]. At the same time the campaign promotes China’s political interests. The objective of this campaign is to motivate and activate environmentalists into protests against US companies. It is framed as another recent example of the escalating activity to undermine Western competitors and further China’s control over rare resources and their processing chains. 

Underlying these disinformation campaigns are criticisms and attacks on Western values and systems of governance, framing liberal democracy as failed, corrupt or weak. Alternatively, they promote affinity or sympathy to isolated and pariah regimes, like Putin’s Russian government.  The US based Centre for Africa Studies documented over 23 campaigns run across Africa in early 2022, across 16 countries promoting Putin’s agenda^[6]. These carefully designed campaigns, by their very nature are often well camouflaged, generate and disseminated false and misleading posts into the social media spaces (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram) across the continent. Their intention is to create confusion complicating people’s ability to recognise fact from fiction, creating division and undermining cohesion. The impact is to undermine social trust, critical thinking and reduce citizens ability to fairly engage in political processes. A weakened information environment provides advantage to corrupt leadership and their third-party operatives while opening up space to manoeuvre for commercial operations not intending to comply with international environmental standards, short cut on working standards and ride rough shod over local community considerations. 

The social negativity campaigns of disinformation sow cannot be dismissed as creating problems specific to local societies. In today’s interconnected world the impact is much more far reaching and, when we look to the progression of industrial societies, troubling. The instability disinformation is known to cause impacts how people perceive their own environment, it fosters resentments and seeks to undermine confidence.  The ensuing instability increases commercial risk, disrupts operational goals and, as undemocratic authoritarians pursue more aggressive agendas, weakens our ability to achieve long term global stability and prosperity. 

John Hultquist, Mandiant’s head of intelligence, said, “We are headed to a future where the likelihood of tools like influence operations being used against key industries will only increase.”

There are actions that operators can take at a site level to counter the malign influence campaigns on their own operations. TCCS offers a service that builds and strengthens an operator’s community communications capabilities. By having a clear strategic objective and ensuring your employees have the right skills, you can make sure your communications have the necessary impact. 

To discuss these issues further contact TCCS here.

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^[1] Sophia Ignatidou, 04 The infodemic and COVID-19 disinformation, Chatham House, The COVID-19 pandemic and trends in technology Transformations in governance and society, Research Paper, ISBN: 978 1 78413 436 5, 16 February, 2021

^[2] Diana Roy, China’s Growing Influence in Latin America – Council on Foreign Relations, online article, April 12, 2022

^[3] Guy Mentel, Is China disseminating fake news in Latin American societies? – Chatham House members webinar, 17 November, 2021

^[4] Cintia Quiliconi and Pablo Rodriguez Vasco, Chinese Mining and Indigenous Resistance in Ecuador, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, online article, September 20, 2021

^[5] Patrick Howell O’Neill, A pro-China online influence campaign is targeting the rare-earths industry, MIT Technology Review, June 28, 2022

^[6] Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Mapping Disinformation in Africa, online article, April 26, 2022