Today's Risky Biz newsletter (thanks @campuscodi) has a really good analysis of the growing influencer problem to national security.
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Today's Risky Biz newsletter (thanks @campuscodi) has a really good analysis of the growing influencer problem to national security.
"China and Russia appear to have understood before everyone else the role social media influencers play in modern societies, and are using them as weapons against unprepared Western democracies.
Both autocratic regimes have passed strict laws regulating the online presence of social media personalities while at the same paying foreign influencers in covert operations designed to subvert and influence foreign societies and elections.
China passed a law at the end of last year mandating that social media influencers and bloggers with over 500,000 followers must list their legal names on their profiles.
Similarly, in Russia, the Kremlin passed a law this year requiring any online personality with over 100,000 followers to register with the country's internet watchdog by the start of next year.
The two countries now have firm control over their social media landscape through the new laws, as well as their national firewall and internet censorship systems.
The crackdown is both the normal response from two paranoid autocratic regimes fearing they might lose control of their societies, but also a means of self-defense.
On the flipside, both countries have used opaque networks of companies to pay and weaponize influencers in other countries to promote their political agendas.
A Recorded Future report published last week concluded China has established over 100 so-called international communication centers (ICCs) across the country since 2023. The centers are tasked with running news websites that push Chinese-friendly propaganda and criticize democratic countries in various areas of the globe. The ICCs have also assembled "networks of thousands of foreign influencers" that get paid to push the same narratives inside the borders of other countries in posts that are designed to look as genuine as possible. Australian think tank ASPI also published a report on this."
https://news.risky.biz/r/8aeee661?m=ebb10ba8-118c-4ebb-aa1e-761703373571
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That ASPI link was hard to search. But this is pertinent:
https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/breaking-the-circle-chinese-communist-party-propaganda
