In total, SITE and its partners spotted over 30 WeChat news accounts that were part of the campaign against Freeland
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OTTAWA — The federal elections monitoring task force says the Chinese government is linked to a “coordinated and malicious” disparagement campaign against Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland on China’s largest social media platform.
In a release late Friday, the federal government’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force said that a suspicious number of “disparaging” posts targeting Freeland recently began appearing on WeChat.
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“The launch of this information operation was traced to WeChat’s most popular news account – an anonymous blog that has been previously linked by experts at the China Digital Times to the People’s Republic of China,” reads the statement from SITE.
The SITE task force was set up in 2019 to monitor for hostile foreign interference during federal elections and by-elections. Its composed of members from CSIS, the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Global Affairs Canada (GAC).
SITE and its partners said Friday they spotted over 30 WeChat news accounts that were part of the campaign against Freeland. The task force briefed both Liberal Party leadership and members of Freeland’s campaign on Friday before making its findings public.
The statement did not say what the disparaging content was about, nor did it identify the WeChat accounts in question. But it said that the malicious content was viewed by millions of people.
“The campaign received very high levels of engagement and views, with WeChat news articles disparaging Ms. Freeland netting over 140,000 interactions between January 29 and February 3, 2025. RRM Canada estimates that 2 to 3 million WeChat users saw the campaign globally,” reads the statement.
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GAC did not immediately respond to a request for more information, such as which accounts were spreading the “disparaging” content and if the government had acted to limit its spread.
In a statement on social media, Freeland said she would not be intimidated by Chinese foreign interference.
“Having spent years confronting authoritarian regimes, I know firsthand the importance of defending our freedoms. Canada’s democracy is strong. My thanks to our national security agencies for protecting it,” she wrote.
In its statement, SITE said it “will continue to monitor the digital information environment for foreign information manipulation, and to shine a light on hostile foreign state-backed information operations during the Liberal Party of Canada leadership campaign.”
In her final report released last week, Foreign Interference Inquiry Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue said disinformation was an “existential threat” against Canada.
She also said the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the biggest foreign interference threat to Canada.
“PRC foreign interference is wide-ranging. It targets all levels of government in Canada. Canadian security and intelligence officials view the PRC as generally ‘party agnostic’: it supports those it believes helpful to its interests at the time, and those it believes are likely to have power, no matter their political party,” Hogue wrote.
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In late 2023, Global Affairs Canada’s Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM), which monitors the Web for foreign state-sponsored disinformation, issued a report linking the Chinese government to a “spamouflage” campaign that used a network of bot accounts to spam thousands of comments on MPs’ Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) accounts in August and September.
The comments targeted posts by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and dozens of other Liberal and Conservative MPs. The accounts, which were either new or hijacked, usually accused the MP of various criminal or ethical violations.
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#China #WeChat #campaign #Chrystia #Freeland #monitors
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