Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) stated that it terminated over 50,000 accounts used by a China-based group to attempt to influence Western audiences over the last year by creating various channels and populating them with pro-China and anti-American content.
TAG has been monitoring Dragonbridge activities since 2019.
Much of the content produced by DRAGONBRIDGE is very low quality and many of the posts have little or no viewers. TAG reports, “Most of their posts are spammy, nonsensical material without an overt political message — often clips of animals, landscapes, food, sports and other content. Blurry visuals, garbled audio, poor translations, malapropisms, and mispronunciations are also common. The content is often hastily produced and error-prone — for example, neglecting to remove Lorem Ipsum text from a video.”
The researchers also point out that “a small fraction” of the accounts promote more coherent posts about current events, with a pro-China slant. The majority of these posts were in Mandarin and focused on negative stories about the United States.
But Dragonbridge is constantly evolving its tactics and techniques for spreading pro-China propaganda and other messages. In 2022, Dragonbridge’s content focused on a variety of topics, including the Ukrainian war, China’s COVID-19 situation, as well as some anti-American messaging.
There is speculation that DRAGONBRIDGE is backed by the Chinese government as part of a larger effort to influence foreign policy approaches through social media apps.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.