NYT: China Planted Disinformation On Maui Wildfires

The New York Times reports:

When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced. The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States.

To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.

For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.

Read the full article.

China’s disinformation campaign using artificial intelligence to sow discord in the U.S. about the Maui wildfires is a rapid change in tactics, researchers from Microsoft and other organizations say. https://t.co/sFjjQ0Ftbe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 12, 2023

“China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the US was spending on the war in Ukraine& that suggested the cash would be better spent @ home for disaster relief” https://t.co/gCk9vSnCNW

— Nicolas Granatino🌻 (@ngranati) September 12, 2023