China-based Covid disinformation operation pushed fake Swiss scientist, Facebook says

Kevin Collier:

China-based propagandists created an elaborate online disinformation campaign this year centered on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook researchers said Wednesday.

Going by the name Dr. Wilson Edwards, the persona wrote on Facebook that the U.S. was putting undue political pressure on the World Health Organization to blame China for the coronavirus. But Edwards isn’t a real person, which Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing made clear in August.

Facebook researchers said they found evidence that the person was the creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company.

Although the character got little attention in the West, he was credulously cited in Chinese state-sponsored media as a whistleblower on world health policy.

Facebook said it had traced that account’s creation to Sichuan Silence Information Technology, a company in central China. According to its website, Silence was founded in 2000 and offers a wide range of information security services — and it counts China’s Ministry of Public Security among its customers. An inquiry sent to an email address on the company’s website bounced back as undeliverable. 

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in an email that “China has shown a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude from the very beginning” in global efforts to research the origins of Covid-19, but did not address specifics about the Facebook account.

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