US Edition
Misinformation casts shadow on US-China trade truce
- In May 2025, following high-level discussions in Geneva, the United States and China reached an agreement to temporarily halt their mutual tariffs for three months, signaling an unexpected easing of tensions in their ongoing trade dispute.
- This pause followed bitter negotiations and was accompanied by a surge of falsehoods on Chinese social media platforms like Douyin and Weibo.
- False narratives included viral videos falsely showing panicked American shoppers buying Chinese TVs, which used recycled 2018 Black Friday footage amplified by Chinese state media.
- Disinformation security firm Cyabra found thousands of fake accounts on Elon Musk-owned X that fueled anti-US influence campaigns targeting brands and urging purchases of Chinese goods.
- Experts including Andrew Mertha expect these state-curated false narratives to persist and evolve alongside China's negotiation strategy, potentially undermining the fragile trade truce.
75 Articles
75 Articles
Frequent purchases for fear of tariffs, revelations of secrets about luxury brands, misleading headlines: a torrent of misinformation fuels the trade war between Washington and Beijing despite the truce. The world’s two largest economies agreed in mid-May to suspend for 90 days the tariffs imposed on each other, after 48 hours of talks in Geneva. But on social networks, including Douyin and Weibo in China, an increase in falsehoods fuels the ant…
Washington, United States. Frenetic purchases for fear of tariffs, revelations of secrets about luxury brands, misleading headlines: a torrent of misinformation fuels the trade war between Washington and Beijing despite the truce.The world's two largest economies agreed in mid-May to suspend for 90 days the tariffs that were imposed on each other, after 48 hours of talks in Geneva.But on social networks, including Douyin and Weibo in China, an i…
An increase in social media disinformation derived from US tariffs to China fuels the commercial tension between the two countries.
Social networks are flooded by a torrent of false news about tariffs.
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