2024-10-22
24 分钟From Recorded Future news, I'm Dina Temple Rest and this is Click here.
Live from the early on election day in 2022, this weird thing happened in the Florida Senate race.
Senator Marco Rubio Congresswoman val Demings decision 2022 before you vote U.
S Senate debate in the wee small hours of the morning, there was this sudden explosion of strange posts about Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent.
We saw tens of thousands of posts from thousands of accounts that can best be described as vaguely supportive of Marco Rubio, but its appearance was really amateurish.
This is Darren Linville.
He's a professor at Clemson University and the co founder of Clemson's media forensics lab.
And the Rubio posts he spotted looked almost like comic strips.
It was not his official campaign content and it was being posted by accounts that had just been created that had no followers.
Nobody was going to see this content.
Which was a head scratcher because engagement is pretty much the point of social media, especially during election season.
The posts kept pouring in until mid morning when just as quickly as they started, they stopped.
So, always curious, Darren and his researchers at the lab started poking around and they traced that burst of election day activity back to China, which is perhaps not surprising.
Senator Rubio is a big China hawk.
I will just say China is a much bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union ever was to America or the world.
More specifically though, they traced the post to a Chinese disinformation group that we've been hearing a lot about these days, something called spamoflage or spamoflage Dragon.
A new report shows a rise in what's known as Spamoflage, with accounts claiming to be US voters posting about hot button issues.
Your first assumption when you hear about something like these Rubio posts is that China might be trying to sway an election, but this Rubio race wasn't tight.
He won by 16 points.
What Darren finally realized was that China's goal wasn't to swing the race so much as to sort of use it as a laboratory.