Google publishes details on Chinese disinformation effort aimed at countries around the world, including New Zealand, using public relations companies

Information technology connecting billions has opened up the floodgates to vast amounts of disinformation and misinformation, becoming a serious national security concern in recent times.

Google has published details on four public relations (PR) firms in China, which the company's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and security division Mandiant say have set up hundreds of domains that pose as independent news sites. 

Said sites publish "inauthentic content that emphasises narratives aligned to the political interests of the People's Republic of China (PRC)," Google TAG and Mandiant said. Known as GLASSBRIDGE, the group is targeting New Zealand and Australia, and many other countries outside China.

GLASSBRIDGE has been active since 2022, Google TAG and Mandiant said, with thousands of websites run by the influence operators being removed from Google News and Discover.

Shanghai Haixun Technology, Times Newswire/Shenzhen Haimai Yunxiang Media, DURINBRIDGE, and Shenzhen Bowen Media are the four PR companies named by Google.

Unfortunately, TAG and Mandiant have not published a list of the domains they've pulled from Google News. A list of names of .nz domains (for example) used to spread propaganda and influence public opinion would be interesting for researchers, particularly now there are artificial intelligence tools that can be used to pattern match large volumes of data. 

It's even possible a smaller country-level domain such as .nz could look at such research to keep an eye on GLASSBRIDGE et al style name registrations, and make it just a tad harder for the bad actors, since the sites tend to follow the same theme. 

The propaganda effort might not matter so much however. Researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy noted in earlier work that prior Chinese influence ops campaigns have had negligible effect.

Despite what the Citizen Lab said in February, it does seem that adversaries of Western nations such as Russia highly value their ability to publish propaganda online. Why else would Russia fine Google US$20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for restricting media channels on YouTube?

Not that we should be surprised that PR is used in this manner. Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" specialised in manipulating public opinion without, it would appear, much concern about ethics and sinking democracy in the process.

Something to think about when you scroll through Facebook, Twitter-X, TikTok and other such places that use technology to create an enormous reach that's nearly instant. Something Bernays might have appreciated when he started out over 100 years ago and probably used to great effect.