TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Speaking at a forum organized by Doublethink Lab on Tuesday in Taipei, senior analyst Jerry Yu said his team monitored the first 100 days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and found that Russian state media, Chinese state outlets, and China-aligned influencers recycled each other’s stories in real time.
These narratives ranged from framing the invasion of Ukraine as the result of US and NATO provocation to presenting it as a denazification campaign. Yu said his team tracked Weibo “hot searches,” a key indicator of China-approved narratives, which showed Russia-Ukraine topics rising to the platform’s top rankings on the first day of the invasion, displacing standard state-sponsored ideological content.
Yu noted that searches for terms like “Nazi” and “Azov Battalion” showed unusual spikes and drop-offs. Before the invasion, Yu said Beijing had suppressed the term “Nazi” in keyword searches, as authorities feared users might draw comparisons to their own government.
According to Yu, Chinese messaging during the first two months moved through four phases. The first he described as leader-bashing, as Chinese platforms circulated false claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had fled Kyiv. Similar narratives were later repurposed by pro-China figures in Taiwan to suggest Taiwanese leaders would abandon the country in a crisis.
The second phase was growing alignment with Russia as anti-US and anti-NATO content increased, alongside portrayals of China as a neutral peacemaker. The third phase was a decline in interest due to COVID, with a domestic outbreak leading to a dramatic drop in discussion of the war, but messaging continued to blame the West for the conflict.
The last phase was described as post-Bucha massacre disinformation in April 2022, when influencers circulated content deflecting responsibility away from Russia for the massacre, reinforcing Beijing’s tilt toward Moscow.
Yu presented case studies showing how old Russian conspiracies were quickly translated into Chinese. One example traced a 2019 Russian falsehood accusing a Ukrainian ex-soldier of aiding Hong Kong protesters. Chinese outlets reposted the same story during the invasion to undermine global sympathy for Ukraine.
Research found the fake news was coordinated by Malaysia-based webpages, Hong Kong groups, and anonymous overseas accounts amplifying China-aligned narratives, often for profit. Some accounts used AI-generated profile photos or reused images lifted from other websites.
Doublethink Lab documented similar operations targeting Taiwan, including narratives that the US was hollowing out TSMC or that Taiwan’s military and defense-industry programs were incompetent or corrupt.
Yu said 2024 election-period monitoring found repeated patterns: anonymous foreign-run pages posting attacks, aggregator pages screenshotting the posts, and coordinated accounts pushing them into large Taiwanese Facebook groups.
He also showed examples of AI-generated video anchors produced with tools linked to China’s ByteDance used to spread political messages across Chinese-language platforms.
In a question-and-answer session, Yu said Russia openly flouts the fact that it is behind fraudulent reporting and often allows its operations to be openly traceable. In contrast, China invests heavily in obscuring its involvement, relying on fabricated personas, AI-produced content, and layered intermediaries.
Yu said different age groups are susceptible to different types of media manipulation, as youth tend to encounter TikTok-style short videos, while older users see text- and image-based narratives. He urged vigilance for all content, as no region is immune to amplification of pro-China messaging.
