cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/54275021

When people talk about foreign influence operations, Russia is usually the first country that comes to mind. We picture troll factories, aggressive TV shows or conspiracy theories spreading on social media.

But a study published this June by Viginum, France’s national agency for countering foreign digital interference, describes a very different approach. At its centre is not loud propaganda, but an entire network of news portals that look like ordinary media outlets and focus mainly on how successful, innovative and essential to the world China supposedly is.

According to Viginum, the network consisted of 13 websites operated by China’s state broadcaster CGTN, or China Global Television Network. The portals published articles in English, French, Spanish and Vietnamese, presenting themselves as independent media outlets. In reality, they were part of a coordinated influence operation, which French authorities named Fawn Mianju.

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One of the best-known portals in the network was called Actu Méridien. It was a French-language website that looked just like an ordinary news outlet. The same network also included the Spanish-language Amigo News, English-language sites and Vietnamese-language publications.

The content of these sites did not focus on criticising the West. Quite the opposite. Readers were told about China’s achievements in aviation and artificial intelligence, Beijing’s leading role in the Global South, and how European countries could benefit from closer cooperation with China. One article, for example, attacked a programme by the French TV channel France 2 that covered the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

This is exactly what sets Chinese influence operations apart from Russia’s. While Russian propaganda is often dominated by conflict, threat perception and confrontation, China’s goal is to build a positive image of itself. Freedom House describes this as a long-term strategy aimed at “telling China’s story well”. At its core is the image of China as a successful, trustworthy and indispensable partner.

Freedom House notes that in France, Chinese state media has for years tried to influence public opinion not only through its own channels, but also through partnerships, paid content and social media influencers. These have included both Facebook influencers and traditional media outlets that have published paid supplements from Chinese state media.

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The most interesting part of the story, however, is the role played by artificial intelligence. According to Viginum’s investigation, since late 2025 CGTN published nearly 3,000 articles, more than 2,300 of which were quickly adapted and republished on other websites in the network. This often happened less than an hour after the original story appeared.

The articles were not copied word for word. The texts were edited, shortened, adapted for different target audiences and rewritten so that they appeared to be original content. Investigators found that the texts showed unusually little natural variation in sentence length and punctuation. This is one of the signs associated with automatically generated or AI-assisted content.

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One mistake led back to CGTN

The strongest evidence linking the network to China’s state broadcaster came from an unexpected place. The administrator of one portal, Actu Méridien, left behind a login trail that led Viginum investigators to a senior project manager at CGTN Digital.

In addition, investigators found a hidden webpage on Actu Méridien’s server that had been built to resemble CGTN’s official website.

An anonymous Viginum analyst told Le Monde that the portal’s technical setup pointed to “a well-resourced actor”. The website was not running on a single server, but used a distributed architecture, professional SEO tools and several different infrastructure components.

Still, it did not become successful propaganda

Perhaps the most surprising part is that, despite the scale of the effort, the operation was not particularly successful. The network was supported by Facebook and Threads accounts, and advertising campaigns were shown to users in as many as 89 countries. Yet individual articles usually received no more than around 15,000 views.

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Influence operations no longer have to look like propaganda.

There is no need for loud voices, militant slogans or obvious fake news. A website that resembles an ordinary news portal is enough. An article about China’s green transition or technological success is enough. And so is artificial intelligence that can adapt the same message for dozens of different target audiences within minutes.

The question is no longer only whether a news story is true or false. The question is who is telling stories about the world, what kinds of stories are being told, and whether the reader even notices that the “news” in front of them was not produced in an independent newsroom, but far away in Beijing.

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