As the COVID-19 pandemic wears on past the 18-month mark, people around the world are growing weary of the mandates, the regulations, the fight against the unseen enemy that continues to feast on the human race. And as people grow weary, they want a target for their frustrations, someone or something to blame for this modern-day plague.
And while it is generally accepted here in the United States that the virus originated in the Wuhan region of China, that’s not exactly a favorable fact for the Communist regime that runs that country to accept. As such, the Chinese government has sought to shift the blame through misinformation, and the latest attempt involves… tainted Maine lobsters?
A tweet sent on September 19, 2021, by Zha Liyou, the Chinese consul general in Kolkata, India, reads: “Major suspect of covid via cold chain identified. A MU298 of Nov 11, 2019 carrying seafood from Maine, US to Huanan Seafood Market, Wuhan, Hubei via Shanghai. During the next few weeks, many workers around around moving this batch of seafood got infected.”
The tweet was noticed by Oxford Internet Institute researcher Marcel Schliebs and appears to be part of a Chinese misinformation campaign hoping to scapegoat the U.S. falsely for the pandemic.
Schliebs, who studies disinformation and propaganda, was able to link the tweet to hundreds of Twitter accounts spreading misinformation that favors China. At least some of those accounts were fake.
"Almost since the beginning of the outbreak, the question of the origin of COVID has been of core importance to the Chinese propaganda apparatus," Schliebs told USA Today. "This coordinated operation was clearly trying to promote narratives in line with Beijing's general propaganda strategy and geopolitical objectives."
Twitter guidelines explicitly prohibit the spreading of COVID misinformation, and after being notified of the tweets by Schliebs, the social media giant suspended the accounts associated with sharing the Maine lobster conspiracy.
"We notified Twitter last week, and they were very responsive and suspended the accounts very rapidly within a few hours. Fortunately, we detected the campaign as it was still in its early growth phase and before it could really start to reach and impact real genuine audiences," Schliebs told USA TODAY.
Reached for comment by NBC, the Chinese Embassy in the U.K.’s spokesperson Kay Yan said China urges “all members of the international community to work together in opposing and resisting such disinformation, which will inevitably disrupt global cooperation in fighting the pandemic.”
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