As Russia's invasion of Ukraine stalled, its television propaganda fired on all cylinders. In recent months we went through 1000s of emails from Russia's biggest state broadcaster to learn how. It was a master class in constructing an alternative reality. nytimes.com/2022/12/15/tec… Each day Russian producers sent incredibly detailed lists of memes and media that could be used to undercut the West. Often that included right-wing cable TV and misleading memes, like this one, showing empty grocery shelves in the US:

It’s day 3 and still videos of protests spread on Chinese social media. We see some familiar tricks, people use filters and take videos of videos to bypass AI models designed to identify sensitive videos. Still, the scale of sharing is likely overwhelming censorship manpower. It’s difficult to censor video. AI trained software can find specific videos, or things in videos (like candles and tanks). But it’s costly to train new algos and the diversity of protest videos makes it very tough. Thus you need people to check, that takes time.

Videos of protests across China are still visible on WeChat, even as they quickly become unplayable. This is definitely another Li Wenliang moment, when the full power of the world’s best censorship system battles the full fury of many Chinese. For now, the censors are struggling It’s worth recalling since Li’s death, we’ve seen with increasing frequency online outrage that even China’s internet controls have struggled to contain. Shanghai lockdowns, Guizhou bus crash, now the Xinjiang fire. Each was a massive censorship event all its own.

Get ready for China state-affiliated commentators to raise objections/kiss up to Elon. It would be surprising if Musk doesn’t get lobbied by Beijing to cut Twitter’s labeling of China media/officials. We’ll see how he responds. Obvi big q is also how he handles China disinfo.

https://twitter.com/huxijin_gt/status/1585913470473867265

Exhibit two in the trend. Again China has been massively active on Twitter with bot nets boosting state media/diplomat disinfo efforts on Covid origins, mass internments in Xinjiang and Russian propaganda like Ukraine bio labs. Musk will have a test in how to deal with it.

https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1585908052829474816

We spent months digging through a 700 gigabyte cache from within Russia's de facto internet intel agency Roskomnadzor.

It gave us one of the most complete pictures yet of Putin's efforts to control the internet. It is at turns farcical and terrifying.
nytimes.com/interactive/20… As Russia's invasion of Ukraine proceeded, local officials in Bashkortostan, a republic east of Moscow where the files are from, noted down in detail online discontent and protests. They tallied views, likes, specific criticism of Putin, and updated dossiers of worst offenders.

Awash in a sea of data, China authorities are trying to police the future.

It's not sci fi. Using vast data records on citizens, new software uses scoring and AI to predict crime and protest before they happen. Often the result is automated prejudice. nytimes.com/2022/06/25/tec… It works like this: Police make blacklists of people they believe are suspicious: drug users, protesters, the mentally ill. Then they aim the surveillance system at those groups, collecting huge amounts of data on activity, location, relationships: nytimes.com/video/world/as…

China is building a new modern marvel. It's not a dam or a high speed rail, it's the most sophisticated domestic surveillance system in the world.

The scale of data collection is staggering. No biometric frontier is neglected. This is how it works: nytimes.com/video/world/as… Our video is based on 1000s of government bidding documents. There are many takeaways, I'll run through a few. The first, is just how meticulous police are in deciding what goes where. Camera placements are thought out meticulously. Police point precisely to locations and angles.

As foreign multinationals head for the exits in Russia, some leave behind darkened offices or coffee shops. Nokia left behind something different: a telecom network wired to help the FSB, successor to the KGB, surveil activists and opposition politicians. nytimes.com/2022/03/28/tec… A trove of 75,000 documents, including schematics, emails, and photos showed how Nokia helped Russia's largest telco connect to an invasive surveillance system called SORM, thru which the FSB spied on emails, chats, phone calls and internet traffic within Russia.

China's digital manhunt goes global: The final piece in our series on China's outbound propaganda and censorship shows how police use ever more sophisticated tech to find and silence those overseas. They target Chinese students and Chinese Americans alike. nytimes.com/2021/12/31/bus… For a sense of what that looks like, here's a video of Chinese police harassing a Chinese student living in Australia. They summoned her father in China to the station, called her on his phone, and demanded she delete a Twitter account that mocked Xi Jinping.

All year we’ve been tracking what Chinese influence campaigns look like on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. A new remarkable document gives us an inside look at how it works: local governments buy global internet manipulation as a subscription service. nytimes.com/interactive/20… The bidding document from Shanghai police lays out with remarkable clarity what they want. The first order of business is fake accounts. They need a company that that can provide 100’s of accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Sometimes they need it quick.

In the Cold War there were useful idiots. In the internet era, we now have useful influencers. Check out our deep dive into a new crop of social media personalities that get major support from China to boost its image overseas. nytimes.com/interactive/20… The rise of the influencers dates back to the protests in Hong Kong, when China first began to more aggressively push its narratives on global social media. It has returned to them again and again, to defuse criticism over Xinjiang and the early spread of the coronavirus.

As Chinese state media worked to shift the narrative around Peng Shuai, they got help from a familiar resource: a big old bot network. We turned up 97 fake accounts amplifying and claiming to believe the creepy proof-of-life posts from state media: nytimes.com/interactive/20… Twitter took down the ones @nytimes and @propublica identified and likely 100s more. It says it's investigating. The accounts mostly pretended to believe Peng was safe and free. Some echoed state-media attacks against foreign media and governments that had expressed concern.

China's Gilded Age is over: riding high off Covid-19 success, Xi Jinping is upending China's private sector. It's about control, to varying ends: guiding innovation, reducing the wealth gap, managing debt, sculpting culture, building self reliance: nytimes.com/2021/10/05/bus… All of this has been long in coming, but the policies/casualties keep piling up. It's a huge story and there's been tons of great coverage, but the world seems just to be waking up to it, so here are some thoughts with links to good stories.

To recap the past year: Beijing cut IPO of Ant Financial, suspended apps of Didi, fined Alibaba. Created new data and algo rules, but exempted gov't. Shut down tutoring sector. Banned foreign textbooks. Declared war on celebrity fandom. Cut kids to 3 hours of games per week.

https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1432269680647962626

Also...likely some ban of foreign IPOs. There are some interesting ideas in Beijing's regulations. Some sectors badly needed controls. But what is happening should unnerve all. Silly parts of private tech fund serious innovative parts. Foreign investment has been critical.

How do you deny genocide accusations today? An online influence campaign of course.

Our breakdown of the anatomy Chinese propaganda campaigns, which now flow fast and at large scale from China to the global internet. This is likely just the beginning. nytimes.com/interactive/20… In recent months thousands of testimonials from inside Xinjiang purporting to show Uyghurs living happily were blasted across the global internet.

The videos look spontaneous. They are anything but. Each step of the way was the hand of China’s government.

The world's best system of disinformation sits not in Moscow, but Beijing. A new leak shows how Beijing pulled on specialized software, censors, trolls, snitches, and police to exert precise control over the early narrative of the coronavirus pandemic. nytimes.com/2020/12/19/tec… Videos that showed hospitals overrun, corpses in the streets, angry residents in lockdown were purged. Media was ordered not to call the virus fatal. Terms like lockdown were downplayed. The heroism of party officials was emphasized.

As Chinese officials hung thousands of cameras across Xinjiang, an abiding question has been how they process all that footage. We found an answer. They're using one of the world's fastest supercomputers. And it was built with American microchips. nytimes.com/2020/11/22/tec… The supercomputer center is as bleak a symbol of dystopian tech as you can imagine. It sits at the end of a forlorn road that passes six prisons. The machines, powered by Intel and Nvidia, line the inside of a strange oval-shaped building with an inexplicably green lawn.

Earlier this year Chinese police dragged Joanne Li from her house, manacled her to a chair, and interrogated her for 3 days. Her crime: sending a link on WeChat. For her, WeChat used to be fun. Now it reminds her of jail. nytimes.com/2020/09/04/tec… Ms. Li's story is instructive as the Trump admin weighs a WeChat ban. In Toronto the app connected her to the Chinese community. But over time she saw how it disconnected that group from reality. Rumors were rife. Some were racist, others political:

A mainland China style digital dragnet is descending on Hong Kong. In the past month HK police have broken into the Facebook account of one politician, hung a camera outside another's house, and tried to phish the login details to Jimmy Lai's Twitter. nytimes.com/2020/08/25/tec… With the Nat Sec law biting, we're seeing more extreme tactics. Police pinned Tony Chung's head in front of his phone to trigger the facial rec. Then they held his finger to the phone's fingerprint scanner. Even tho neither worked, they seemed to break into his FB account later.

So Zoom suspended the account of @ZhouFengSuo after he hosted a virtual vigil to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Some context on Zoom in China: it has been on Chinese censor's radar for a while, but seems to have fallen thru the cracks. nytimes.com/2020/06/11/tec… In Sept. 2019 Zoom was briefly blocked in China. In response a Zoom reseller posted instructions for real-name registration and said there had been a call from the Ministry of Public Security to follow the cybersecurity law. That got it out of the doghouse for the time being.

I’m very proud. But worth saying, the situation in Xinjiang remains a terrible tragedy. Millions, like Ferkat’s mother, suffer silently under surveillance and intimidation. The bulk of our team is no longer allowed to report in China, so such abuses are now much harder to cover.

https://twitter.com/gillianwong/status/1257448712202260480

Proud to have been part of an amazing team and a huge thanks also to all the editors who are so indispensable and don’t get enough acknowledgement: @gillianwong @CRTejada @adriennecarter @puiwingtam @ellenjpollock1 @meslackman @panphil