Foreign influencers operating across a wide range of social media platforms have been a consistent source of information manipulation aligned with Chinese influence operations. These foreign influencers – ranging from social media commentators and travel bloggers to self-proclaimed experts and state media journalists – are valuable assets for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as they choose to create content aligned with the ‘main melody’ (主旋律) of party propaganda.

The operations of foreign influencers are widely documented, and identified as a parallel trend to China’s restriction and suppression of foreign journalistic reporting. While these activities are consistent with traditional models of propaganda, coordinated information production and circulation can be deployed as part of foreign influence operations to compete with and suppress unfavourable or sensitive content. In the context of contemporary social media ecosystems, influencers become key actors who can circulate and promote content at scale.

Over the past decade, foreign influencers have discounted accusations of ethnic repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, praised China’s COVID-19 response, condemned U.S. trade war measures, and more generally celebrated China’s economic development and safety when compared to Western countries. While some of these influencers are likely to be supported by state propaganda actors, many claim to be independent and self-directed, operating only out of interest – a view shared by Chinese state media.

A New Kind of Influencer

Since at least 2023, a new kind of foreign influencers has cropped up: synthetic ones. AI-generated videos depicting foreign nationals proliferate on Chinese social media platforms, covering a wide variety of characters and range of discussed topics. The most documented kind of synthetic influencers operating in China are young Russian women, often speaking perfect Mandarin, who express their eagerness to marry Chinese men.

Many of them also express their appreciation of China – where they often claim to live or work – and celebrate the friendship and alignment between China and Russia. Analyses of these synthetic influencers’ social media accounts have found that many of them operate online stores selling food and beauty products, pointing towards a convergence of information manipulation and economic interests.

In terms of technology, many of these videos appear to be rather amateurish and easily detectable, as they are generated with commercially available products and often deploy the same stock characters across multiple accounts. In several cases, individuals have found their own likeness appropriated by these accounts, as in the case of Ukrainian student Olga Loiek, whose face has been used to produce videos of multiple Russian women praising China and selling Russian products.

But not all synthetic influencers are young Russian women: accounts with names like ‘Lilian’, ‘Aurora’ or ‘Rosalie’ depict foreigners offering nuggets of pop psychology or relationship advice in perfect Mandarin. Their likeness is sometimes unrecognisable, other times very clear, as they have been found to impersonate (without any consent from the offended parties) Hollywood actors like Chris Evans, or less public figures like American professor Andrea Gabor.

Over the past decade, foreign influencers have discounted accusations of ethnic repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, praised China’s COVID-19 response, condemned U.S. trade war measures, and more generally celebrated China’s economic development and safety when compared to Western countries.

The Many Faces of Synthetic Influencers

On the Chinese social media platform WeChat, synthetic influencers are not difficult to find. Many of them have similar account names, and once one starts watching their short video, the platform recommends more and more. One account, for example, is called “Cole’s Thought Patterns”, and has uploaded more than a hundred videos all featuring the same protagonist – a well-dressed, middle-aged Caucasian man claiming to be based in the Guangdong province.

Cole describes his account with a simple tagline: “Broaden your thinking, improve your cognition. Love China, love peace!” The videos he uploads slowly change in tone and topic – in the beginning, they are about wellbeing and work-life balance; in these videos, Cole presents himself as an American and speaks English. Then, Cole starts discussing Chinese history, and his videos include rousing orchestral music and footage of military parades: “China never bullies others,” he warns, “Don’t let others try to bully China.”

Weeks later, Cole switches to Mandarin Chinese, and starts praising China for its safety and development: “Your country has more than five thousand years of history and culture. It is also the safest in the world, the country with the highest happiness index.” After several videos about China’s military might and rich history, Cole starts discussing Russia, highlighting the country’s friendliness to Chinese tourists, and praising the closeness between China and Russia in times of difficulty.

Eventually, Cole starts claiming to be himself Russian: “I came to China this time and my family brought me many specialties from our hometown in Russia, I put them all for sale in my online shop – as we get ready for the New Year, please browse my store and buy whatever you need.” A few days later, the tone gets more dramatic, as Cole claims to have received a draft notice and asks his followers to support him by buying products so that he can remain in China.

Accounts of synthetic influencers like Cole raise many questions.

First, it is difficult to evaluate their reach and goals. Cole’s most watched videos have thousands of likes and reshares, and some products in his shop have sold hundreds of units, but these metrics could easily be artificially inflated. While the WeChat platform clearly marks all of his videos with a warning about the presence of AI-generated content, most of the comments are oblivious to this detail, and praise Cole for his excellent Mandarin and patriotic positions.

Secondly, while these accounts follow the ‘main melody’ of party propaganda with surprising accuracy (in Cole’s case, shifting from the US-China trade war to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), their ultimate goal seems to be quite consistent: selling products or courses. While the creation and operation of synthetic influencers could be a coordinated effort, it could also be driven by economic incentives, and align to patriotic talking points in order to gather followers without incurring in censorship.

Lastly, the synthetic influencers operating on Chinese social media platforms appear to be designed for a domestic audience: they either speak Mandarin, or English with Mandarin subtitles, and they discuss everyday issues or political matters that easily resonate with Chinese users. Yet their reach isn’t limited to this.

Internationally Accessible Content

As Chinese platforms become increasingly globalized, their content easily crosses over national and regional borders. This is very evident in Cole’s case, as at least one of his videos is also available on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. In it, he says:

“You know we foreigners, how much do we envy your Chinese life? First, your China is the safest country in the world. Street violence and fights are nonexistent […] I can sleep soundly at night. […] You also have the world’s largest, the best high-speed rail and network. […] It’s also very convenient if you want to buy something in the middle of the night. […] In the eyes of US foreigners, China is already the most suitable place for human beings to live. I also want to join the big family of China.”

The case of synthetic foreign influencers on Chinese social media encapsulates two important aspects of the use of generative AI for information manipulation:

1. It demonstrates that new technologies lower the threshold for content creation, allowing users to scale up previously existing genres (in this case, foreign influencers) without the need for actual human actors or technical skills.
2. It confirms existing findings about the difficulty of pinpointing agency and goals in influence operations: as many of these AI-generated personalities seem to be driven by profit and target a domestic audience, their contribution to transnational information manipulation might only be accidental, as some of their content travels across platforms and reaches different audiences.