Then-President Trump Reportedly Authorized the CIA To Use Chinese Social Media Against Its Government

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

New reporting by Reuters claims that in 2019, then-President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to use Chinese social media to turn public opinion against Xi Jinping’s government.

Reuters cited “former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.” The report continued:

Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
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The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters.

The social media propaganda was meant “to foment paranoia among top leaders” in China, according to two former officials.

“We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one official told Reuters.

The CIA would not comment on Reuters report, but a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the report proved that the U.S. government uses the “public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.”

Reuters said it was unable to determine if the social media operations had the desired outcome. Neither was Reuters able to confirm whether President Joe Biden has continued the program.

The report comes as the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill to force Chinese company ByteDance to divest from social media platform TikTok within six months or face a U.S. ban. House Republicans contend that TikTok’s Chinese ties pose a national security risk to the United States. Although Trump led the effort to ban the app while he was in office, he has recently opposed this bill.

Trump told CNBC, “There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok, but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”

Read the Reuters article here.