Outside of Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora, the People’s Republic of China is not actively using bots to target elections, according to Oxford Internet Institute professor Philip Howard in recent US Senate testimony on Foreign Influence on Social Media.
“So far we have not documented much Chinese activity,” he told US Senators.
“We know they spend time working on voters in Taiwan, they work on the Chinese diaspora.
“We believe they have capacity but as of yet they have not set American voters in their sights.”
Go to 39.00 minute mark of the linked video to hear his remarks.
Howard’s Computational Propaganda project estimates China has between 300,000 to 2 million people ‘cybertroops’ to shape perceptions.
Alas, many would be inward-facing. The woes of internal division and information control.
That doesn’t mean that the diaspora community in Australia wouldn’t be a target of them – but perhaps just not at a massive scale.
The Cold War Daily 