NATO Official: China and Russia Are Teaming up on Disinformation

Russia's President Vladimir Putin arrives at Beijing Capital International Airport to attend the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on Oct. 17, 2023. Parker Song/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

A senior NATO official has told MPs China and Russia are amplifying each other’s messages in a disinformation war against the West.

The House of Commons Defence Select Committee is conducting an investigation into the “grey zone” which is described on their website as being “coercive activities” which “fall below perceived thresholds for military action and across areas of responsibility of different parts of the government.”

James Appathurai, NATO’s deputy assistant secretary general for innovation, hybrid, and cyber, told the committee on Monday, “We see different kinds of hybrid or grey zone pressure being put on by these two separate actors, but in some cases, they are related and mutually reinforcing.”

“That is in particular the case when it comes to disinformation where China is amplifying Russian disinformation, on NATO, on Ukraine, on the West, including in areas of strategic importance to us,” added Mr. Appathurai, who is himself Canadian.

“It is clearly the case China is on a persistent, consistent basis, amplifying Russian messages and it is not simply an echo ... Until just a few years ago China would have never commented on NATO at all, or on Ukraine at all,” he added.

Asked by the chair of the committee, Sir Jeremy Quin, if Russia and China were coordinating their disinformation campaigns, Mr. Appathurai said they had cooperated on an ad hoc basis but believes that is no longer the case.

“China has a public hierarchy of partnership arrangements with other countries. It has only one partner that has the highest level of signed partnership agreement and that is with Russia,” he said.

Mr. Appathurai said Russian trade with China had gone up “very substantially” since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and China was supplying components and equipment which President Vladimir Putin is using in the military campaign.

He said: “But what unites them most fundamentally, is a shared desire to see the United States get out of their neighbourhoods so they can do what they want to their neighbours. And this is a very powerful motivation.”

Mr. Appathurai said in the past China had been careful not to be seen to be intervening or interfering in politics in other parts of the world because it was sensitive about its problems in places like Tibet and Xinjiang.

But he said: “In Europe, that is no longer the case. It doesn’t serve China’s interests directly to comment on NATO, we have posed no threat to China. So you can see that this relationship (between Russia and China) is structural including when it comes to disinformation and when it comes to activities in other political bodies, including the U.N. and the U.N. system.”

Mr. Appathurai also painted a dystopian picture of a future where artificial intelligence (AI) has made the general public completely suspicious and cynical.

He said: “There is a real risk that generative AI will profoundly turbocharge in particular disinformation, political interference and cyber attacks.”

In December 2023 YouTube took down one of the biggest ever disinformation campaigns, known as Shadow Play, which was masterminded by China.

Clint Watts, president of Miburo, a research firm that tracks foreign disinformation operations, works at his desktop at company headquarters in New York on March 15, 2022. Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo

Deepfakes ‘Extremely Difficult to Detect’

Mr. Appathurai said AI deepfakes were “extremely difficult to detect.”

Mr. Appathurai some of the big social media platforms estimate a 20 to 25 percent success rate when it comes to detecting deep fake videos but added, “When it comes to text, it’s zero.”

He said ChatGPT and similar AI tools had “democratised” the process so you no longer needed to be a computer programmer to produce a deepfake.

Mr. Appathurai said, “What we hear from the companies is that within one year 80 percent of what’s generated for the internet will be generated by AI.”

He said it had been estimated that by 2028 “99 percent” of what is on the internet will be fake.

“So if you think through what that means for politicians and for the political process, what I believe is that most people will learn not to believe anything they see, including when they see you saying something on TV,” he told the MPs.

Mr. Appathurai added, “So I think you better get used to shaking hands and going to town hall meetings, because it’s going to be much, much more important for the political process.”

Mr. Appathurai said 2024 was going to be a very important year with elections in Britain, India, the United States, and the European Union.

He said, “I’ve just talked to the deputy prime minister of a partner country who said that in his country, the Russians are already using deepfakes to sway the population in the run up to votes and referenda.”

Mr. Appathurai said that with disinformation rising he was concerned that a lot of social media platforms were removing content moderation which meant a likelihood deepfakes would proliferate.

He said there had been a big increase in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and he said the Russians have been using their influence in the energy market to coerce countries.

Mr. Appathurai said: “But now you see new elements such as forced migration, we’ve seen that over the last couple of years, and now there are clear warnings from our military and the intelligence chiefs in public about the increasing risks of an act of sabotage.”