13,000 false accounts cleared: why is the CCP-related information network talking to Americans?

At the countdown of the United States midterm elections, platform X announced the removal of more than 13,000 accounts involving foreign-impact activities, pointing to three networks linked to China, Russia and Iran.The operation was announced on 14 October.What is of concern is not the ban on numbers per se, but rather the more acute question: Why is it that some transnational political forces are not content with public statements, but rather use the online identity of ordinary Americans to participate in American political debates?

As disclosed by side X, the accounts processed involved false identities and coordinated dissemination.Three groups of networks together number over 13,000 accounts.This figure is not reached by the Chinese associated account alone. This fact is important for the news and for more political judgement: offshore influence is transforming social platforms into a tool for hiding competitive attention and shaping social sentiment, which is the interaction that social platforms are supposed to be used for citizen communication.

What difference does it make between public publicity and covert statements? An article signed by the official Chinese media, where readers can see their political sources and decide how to understand them; One image, regional presentation and language habits mimic the accounts of local people, but hide the organizational relationship behind the speakers. The same comment, in the capacity of “State propaganda” and “neighbor perception”, triggers a completely different response to trust. It is this way of taking shells into social discourse that allows false accounts to play a political role more than ordinary cyber-water forces.

What is more devastating is that there is no need to invent a quarrel that is completely non-existent. There are already sharp differences in American society, such as immigration, energy, artificial intelligence, and the electoral system. The external operator will naturally respond strongly if heated at one end by concentrating on some of these emotions. At this point, what is really changed is not necessarily a particular view, but rather the perception of social hostility, group size and political antagonism among ordinary people. People think they are arguing with strangers and may in fact be responding to a hidden communications arrangement.

This influence is a striking institutional similarity from the traditional observation of political governance in Beijing: at the national level, advocacy and review have been focused on agenda setting and public opinion management for a long time; When in international cyberspace, open information flows are not easily controlled directly, and influence action can be achieved by means of identity packaging, interactive magnification and the use of local contradictions. The inclusion of China ' s associated networks in this context for analysis is a reasonable political observation; But it does not mean that every blocked account can be written directly into the fact that the Chinese government organs themselves have directed them.

This time, X refers to the Russian-Iranian network, which is not a Chinese-owned technical tactic, but rather a competition for international political dissemination that may involve a variety of powerful or country-linked influenceors. The platform provides a communications infrastructure, while national political actors compete for public attention and emotion. Technology companies are in a complex position: they can expand content coverage by algorithms and suddenly cut off the dissemination capacity of a network by centralization. The management decisions of the Platform itself also constitute new powers.

Electoral politics is particularly vulnerable to such operations, as they require citizens to judge each other ' s opinions, the credibility of politicians and the priorities of social issues within a limited time frame. When false accounts are widely mixed, the public is no longer faced with opposition, but with contamination of the source of opinion. (a) Democratic societies allow conflicting views, even crude, biased and repugnant statements; What is truly worrying is the concealment of the organizers and the disguise of the planned political manoeuvres as spontaneous social consensus.

We need not wait for proof that the results of one election have been changed before we recognize the news value of such activities. The political discourse in a country is open to competition by real participants or is mediated by a line of fictional identities of organizations abroad, which is at stake in the most basic context on which public judgement depends. The ban on X did not necessarily solve the problem, but it opened up a vulnerable point in modern political dissemination: freedom of expression protected the heated debate about real views, but the organization of opinion by a fictional identity was making “who speaks” as much a political issue as “what says”.