Researchers Identify Chinese Influence Network That Targeted Trump, Japan Elections

Researchers have uncovered a network of more than 330 social media accounts linked to China that targeted U.S. President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, human rights organizations, and other countries to push pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives, according to a Feb. 26 policy brief.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank based in Washington, discovered the network coordinating to push these narratives between December 2025 and February 2026 across X, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, and Quora.

The researchers identified six “clusters” of accounts that focused on different narratives, which were aimed at attacking political figures seen as acting against the CCP’s interests.

The largest nexus included 151 accounts that targeted audiences in the United States, including ones posing as American citizens and criticizing Trump’s policies, such as claiming that he had caused or worsened the fentanyl crisis. Notably, accounts with few or no followers made posts that generated thousands of replies, indicating the use of what researchers say is an “inauthentic amplification network.”

“This tactic is used to manipulate platform algorithms into pushing content into the feeds of real users,” the brief reads.

Another cluster attacked Takaichi before the Japanese election, portraying her as “corrupt and militaristic.”

A separate cluster of activity targeted Uyghur activists and promoted anti-Uyghur sentiments among Canadian and Japanese users. The CCP has persecuted the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region for years, conducting mass surveillance and forcing them into slave labor. There is also emerging evidence of forced organ harvesting from the group. The United States has designated the Uyghur persecution as a genocide.

A fourth narrative accused U.S. organizations of “collusion” with Taiwan and payouts to undermine China while denying the CCP’s human rights abuses.

A fifth cluster accused the United States of interfering with Honduran elections, and a sixth amplified criticism of and supported protests against the Philippine president.

In some cases, the inauthentic accounts adopted names and images similar to those of official organizations, such as U.S. agencies.

“Collectively the accounts manipulate recommendation algorithms to push their narratives on unsuspecting social media consumers,” the FDD brief reads.

The think tank recommends that the United States develop counter-influence capabilities, pointing to the recently created position of director of cognitive advantage at the U.S. National Security Council as a fitting option to spearhead such an effort.

FDD researchers said the campaign “closely mirrors” the Chinese Spamouflage operation, one of the best-known CCP-backed online disinformation campaigns.

Research firm Graphika published a comprehensive report on Spamouflage in 2019, following Twitter’s takedown of 3.5 million posts linked to the CCP.

Graphika has published several reports on Chinese online influence campaigns over the years and, along with other researchers, says that influence campaigns using inauthentic accounts are increasingly using artificial intelligence.

The company recently uncovered a network of web domains posing as well-known news media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. The domains were used to boost pro-CCP content and attack the spiritual practice Falun Gong.

Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s and quickly grew; the state estimated that one in 13 Chinese citizens were practicing it by the end of the decade, and it is now practiced worldwide.

In 1999, the CCP effectively banned Falun Gong overnight and launched a violent persecution that continues today. Human rights organizations, independent investigators, and international media outlets, including The Epoch Times, have documented cases of illegal arrests, torture, brainwashing, and forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners.

The CCP has been known to carry out transnational repression of overseas practitioners of Falun Gong and foreign officials who have expressed support for the practitioners’ freedom of belief and expression.