A new report highlighted by Newsweek reveals that fake accounts, likely Chinese in origin, flooded tech billionaire Elon Musk's X platform around when President Donald Trump was rolling out his so-called "reciprocal tariff" regime, to influence public opinion.
Trump originally announced tariffs on virtually every country, ranging from 10 to 49 percent, and 145 percent on China. As markets and members of his own party reacted in fear of a recession, Trump gradually instituted various pauses and reductions, and most recently offered China significantly lower — but still historically high — tariff rates, while exempting some of America's most vital imports.
"Graphika, a New York-based company that leverages AI to analyze online communities, says it has identified a network of more than 1,000 X (formerly Twitter) accounts seeking to influence perceptions of the trade war in the social media space," noted the report. "'This included using fake personas purporting to be users in the U.S. and other countries, stealing content from authentic users, and the coordinated amplification of hashtags and media articles,' the firm said in a report released Tuesday."
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These fake accounts posed as real people worried about tariffs negatively impacting the American people and often echoed content from other people, sometimes highlighting international blowback from the tariffs as well.
It was easy to identify the accounts, the report continued, by their names: "For instance, most featured combinations of Western first and last names, with both parts capitalized and joined, such as 'BriannaShaw.' The most commonly used default usernames are of a format assigned to new accounts, containing long sequences of random digits such as @GeorgeZip35528260. Some accounts listed self-reported locations with glaring errors, such as repeating the same U.S. state three times."
"Based on an analysis of content disseminated by the operation and similarities between the identified behaviors and past influence operations attributed to Chinese state actors, we assess that the network operator(s) were very likely aligned with the interests of China," Graphika concluded, while acknowledging it was impossible to be sure.
Trump's tariff regime is not just under fire by China, however, as even members of Trump's own party were worried about the impact to their states and districts, and scrambled to get carveouts for themselves.
