Beijing is increasing its aggressive activities in the spheres of influence operations (IOs), both online and offline; in the online realm, relevant to the findings in this report, Chinese IOs are shifting their tactics and increasing their volume of activity, according to research by CitizenLab.

A network of at least 123 websites operated from within the People’s Republic of China while posing as local news outlets in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, disseminates pro-Beijing disinformation and ad hominem attacks within much larger volumes of commercial press releases. CitizenLab names this campaign PAPERWALL. PAPERWALL has similarities with HaiEnergy, an influence operation first reported on in 2022 by the cybersecurity company Mandiant. However, we assess PAPERWALL to be a distinct campaign with different operators and unique techniques, tactics and procedures. PAPERWALL draws significant portions of its content from Times Newswire, a newswire service that was previously linked to HaiEnergy. We found evidence that Times Newswire regularly seeds pro-Beijing political content, including ad hominem attacks, by concealing it within large amounts of seemingly benign commercial content. A central feature of PAPERWALL, observed across the network of websites, is the ephemeral nature of its most aggressive components, whereby articles attacking Beijing’s critics are routinely removed from these websites some time after they are published. We attribute the PAPERWALL campaign to Shenzhen Haimaiyunxiang Media Co., Ltd., aka Haimai, a PR firm in China based on digital infrastructure linkages between the firm’s official website and the network. While the campaign’s websites enjoyed negligible exposure to date, there is a heightened risk of inadvertent amplification by the local media and target audiences, as a result of the quick multiplication of these websites and their adaptiveness to local languages and content. These findings confirm the increasingly important role private firms play in the realm of digital influence operations and the propensity of the Chinese government to make use of them.

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Netwerk van nieuwssites verspreidt al jarenlang pro-Chinese desinformatie, ook in Nederland