US-based Critic of Chinese censorship targeted by troll campaign

(This article is based on my reporting for a VOA Mandarin story)

A vocal critic of China’s internet censorship has become the target of a months-long online harassment campaign that experts say resembles a Beijing-backed influence operation known as Spamouflage.

For two months, Eric Liu, a California resident, has received hundreds of disparaging comments and messages on his social media, including threats to his personal safety, from a troll network consisting of over 150 accounts.

Liu told me that he started seeing these comments on X around November 20. When he migrated to Bluesky, a similar microblogging platform, in December, the harassment followed.

Before immigrating to the United States in 2020, Liu had taken on jobs at multiple Chinese internet companies as a censor. He grew to dislike the nature of his work and became a whistleblower. In 2016, he anonymously provided internal documents to the Committee to Protect Journalists to expose the inner workings of censorship on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform, where Liu worked.

For the past four years, Liu has established himself as one of the most vocal critics of China’s control over internet speech and is often quoted by Western media in stories about Chinese censorship.

Many of the comments Liu received from the troll network accused him of betraying his country and called him a “running dog” of the U.S. government.

I counted at least 73 suspicious accounts on X and over 80 on Bluesky that have targeted Liu. Many of them had profile pictures that were either stolen from the internet or looked AI generated.

After studying some of the Bluesky accounts I had collected, Jasper Hewitt, a researcher at Taiwan’s DoubleThink Lab, a social media analytic firm, said that they have demonstrated highly coordinated and robotic behavior. 

For example, he pointed out that many of the accounts were registered on the same day and, in one instance, 23 such accounts replied to five of Liu’s posts within a timespan of 30 minutes.

This is Liu’s first time finding himself in the crosshairs of a harassment campaign and he believes Beijing is behind it.

“They probably want me to shut up,” he told me. “That’s why they persistently mock me and reprimand me in a sarcastic tone.”

Liu noticed that the troll accounts’ activities largely corresponded to work schedules in China. He said that the harassers took a break on New Year’s Day and haven’t been active since the start of Spring Festival, when many Chinese companies and government agencies would take long recesses.

Some of the troll accounts posted cartoons that depicted Liu as a traitor who sold his integrity to gain personal interests from the U.S..

To Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, the cartoons are a “calling card” indicating the campaign’s connection to the Chinese government.

Linvill, who studies online manipulation and foreign disinformation, told me that the use of personalized cartoons to attack individuals is a trademark of Spamouflage, a Beijing-backed influence operation aimed at spreading disinformation and harassing Chinese dissidents overseas.

Victims of previous such operations include journalists, dissidents and scholars, many of whom were either of Chinese descent or had been born in China.

“They routinely accuse individuals of being puppets of the West, and the United States specifically, while also employing a range of sometimes personal and explicit attacks,” Linvill wrote in an email.

Liu has also received over a hundred direct messages on X berating and degrading him. According to screenshots he shared with me, some messages were generic but straightforward death threats.

In 2023, the Justice Department charged 34 officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security for allegedly harassing Chinese dissidents in the U.S. and promoting Chinese propaganda using fake social media accounts in an attempt to “sow divisions within the United States”.

The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected the accusations, including its alleged connection to Spamouflage, and called them “full of prejudice and malicious speculation against China”. 

The troll network that attacked Liu had also, albeit to a much lesser degree, attacked other people critical of Beijing, including Su Yutong, a Chinese journalist based in Berlin, Yao Cheng, a former officer in China’s Air Force, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Stop putting on a show Rubio, you only brag about your achievements and do nothing,” one troll account wrote in October, when Rubio was still a Senator.

Safeguard Defenders, a non-governmental organization tracking on human rights violations and repressions in or coming from China, have also been targeted by the troll network and accused baselessly, sometimes through cartoons, of meddling in the 2024 U.S. election to help Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, to win.

Laura Harth, the organization’s lead on transnational repression, told me that the campaign against Safeguard Defenders started in June last year and is still continuing today on multiple platforms in multiple languages.

Her staff has been monitoring and documenting these troll attacks against them. “But it’s been so much that it’s impossible to do that all the time,” she said.

Both Bluesky and X have already hidden some of the harassing comments under Liu’s posts. Bluesky, in addition, labeled many of the troll accounts spam.

Liu said he has not been bothered by the comments and messages he received and that he did not block any of the accounts because he wants to study them.

However, knowing that Beijing has potentially put a target on him, Liu admitted that he is somewhat worried.

“What they posted hasn't really had much impact on me,” he told me. “But being targeted like this, being targeted by China, I do feel like I should be on guard. It’s quite scary.”