China is pushing a new Covid origin theory: Maine lobsters 6park.com
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Olivia Solon and Keir Simmons and Amy Perrette 6park.com
Thu, October 21, 2021, 6:48 AM 6park.com
In mid-September, Marcel Schliebs, a disinformation researcher at the University of Oxford who had been tracking messaging that Chinese diplomats and state media spread on Twitter for 18 months, spotted the emergence of a surprising coronavirus origin theory.  
Zha Liyou, the Chinese consul general in Kolkata, India, tweeted an unfounded claim that Covid-19 could have been imported to China from the United States through a batch of Maine lobsters shipped to a seafood market in Wuhan in November 2019. It marks the latest in a series of theories that have been pushed by pro-China accounts since the start of the pandemic.
With some further digging, Schliebs uncovered a network of more than 550 Twitter accounts, which he shared with NBC News, spreading a nearly identical message, translated into multiple languages — including English, Spanish, French, Polish, Korean and even Latin — at similar times each day between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. China Standard Time. 
Some of the accounts were “unsophisticated sock puppets” with “very few or zero followers,” Schliebs said, while others appeared to be accounts that were once authentic but had been hijacked and repurposed to spread disinformation.  
Read more about this story at NBCNews.com and watch "TODAY" this morning at 7 a.m. ET.
“Attribution is really difficult,” said Schliebs, a postdoctoral researcher of computational propaganda at Oxford’s Programme on Democracy and Technology. “But we can see there’s a coordinated effort, and that it’s a pro-Chinese narrative.”
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Articles in Chinese media, shared on social networks, have repeatedly suggested that Covid-19 may have originated from frozen-food imports. The same diplomat Schliebs noticed pushing the Maine lobster theory last month had already tweeted in December about the theory that Covid could have arrived in Wuhan from elsewhere via the "cold chain" and called for further investigation into the baseless claim that the U.S. military was involved in spreading the virus.
“This is the third or fourth major different redirection Chinese officials have gone in to try and somehow pin the Covid outbreak on the U.S.,” Bret Schafer, the head of the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, part of the nonprofit German Marshall Fund of the United States, said about the diplomats spreading the messaging bolstered by inauthentic accounts. “It looks crude and not sophisticated when you look at individual accounts. But these kinds of networks are designed to try and get topics to trend on social media.”
“Whether or not anyone is buying into lobster or Fort Detrick being the source of Covid, it’s at least having the effect of muddying the truth and confusing people,” he added. (Fort Detrick, in Maryland, is the home of the U.S. biological defense program.)
Schliebs said he shared with Twitter a spreadsheet of the accounts that appeared to be behaving inauthentically. The social media platform said it reviewed the accounts and suspended them under its platform manipulation and spam policy.
“Our top priority is keeping people safe, and we remain vigilant about coordinated activity on our service,” Twitter spokesperson Marco Bilello said. “Using both technology and human review, we proactively and routinely tackle attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them at scale by actioning millions of accounts each week for violating our policies in this area.”
Twitter investigates inauthentic networks of accounts to see if it can reliably attribute them to state-linked activity, the company said, but that process can take several months. It has not yet linked this network to anyone working for the Chinese government.
Because of how quickly Schliebs’ team identified the network, the “real-world impact was likely small,” he said. “We alerted Twitter about the network, and they quickly suspended it just as it was starting to gain traction, when the network was in its growth phase.”
Lobster
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