Report: China’s Spamouflage disinformation campaign testing techniques on Sen. Marco Rubio

The covert Chinese information operation known as Spamouflage has renewed its long-running disinformation campaign against Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, according to researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Lab.

In a report written by Clemson University professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, obtained by the Click Here podcast and Recorded Future News, the researchers found that in mid-September Spamouflage seemed to be targeting Rubio’s official X account to test a roster of new tactics, some not previously observed. In 2022, the group had flooded the senator’s social media accounts with posts during his re-election bid.

“In the campaign we saw beginning in mid-September there wasn’t a lot of engagement with these accounts so we don’t think it was about that,” Darren Linvill, co-founder of the Media Forensics Lab said in an interview. “We think they were testing new tactics before they might apply them more broadly elsewhere. Sen. Rubio may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine and this might serve as a warning of some things to come.”

The initial Spamouflage operation against the Florida senator began early on Election Day in November 2022. At the time, Rubio was running against Democrat Val Demings. The race wasn’t close — Rubio eventually won by some 16 points. 

Even so, that morning Linvill and his team noticed a sudden explosion of posts about Rubio across a number of platforms. On Twitter, now X, they found some 20,000 messages from 6,500 different accounts – all posted in a matter of hours. 

While the content seemed generally supportive of Rubio, “the content’s appearance was really amateurish,” said Linvill. “They looked like comic strips, not something a professional campaign would produce.”

Flooding the zone with posts is standard operating procedure in China information operations, researchers say. If there's a hashtag that China doesn't like, or even an individual the CCP doesn't like, they might just start posting thousands of messages using that hashtag to drown out real content. 

In the 2022 Rubio case, people would have had to scroll through all these seemingly innocuous posts from Spamouflage before they can get to Marco Rubio’s real content — the calculus is that constituents might lose interest before they get that far. “It's just like playing static really, really loudly,” Linvill said, “and it is really difficult for the real message to break through the noise.”

Testing techniques 

The 2022 campaign also included a number of articles about Rubio posted to various platforms like Medium and Reddit. “There were articles with titles like ‘What you don’t know about Marco Antonio Rubio’ and ‘The person who betrayed Trump was actually Marco Antonio Rubio,’” Linvill said. “And they referred to Rubio as ‘unhinged.’” 

Eventually Linvill and his team traced those posts back to China and the Spamouflage network of accounts.

In the past, Chinese influence campaigns focused on boosting narratives that the Chinese Communist Party favored. But more recently, China seems to be tearing a page from the Russian disinformation playbook and have tried their hand at sowing divisions among groups in the U.S. and highlighting American domestic problems like homelessness and gun violence.

In the 2024 campaign against Rubio that began in mid-September, Spamouflage used a smaller number of hijacked and repurposed accounts that had more posts, followers and looked more authentic. This time, instead of being generally supportive of Rubio, the campaign shared overtly anti-Rubio content and then amplified it. They took images of paragraphs attacking Rubio and then shared them not just on X, but on Reddit and Medium as well. 

Linvill said the posts were relatively well written, and Spamouflage may have used AI or a large language model to write them.

When contacted by Recorded Future News, Sen. Rubio declined to address the Spamouflage campaign directly, but in a written statement he acknowledged that China is stepping up its information operations more generally.

“China is becoming increasingly more aggressive and needs to be taken very seriously,” he said. “China’s goal is to shape American opinion on critical issues and target specific candidates, especially those they view as anti-China.” Rubio is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a frequent and vocal critic of China. 

Linvill said that we underestimate China’s resolve to insert themselves into the national conversation at our peril.

“China gets a bad rap from some disinformation researchers,” he said. “They suggest that they don’t have the cultural expertise, that they’re not as sophisticated… but I think that misidentifies what China is actually doing. I think that there are a lot of different ways that this kind of thing can happen. What reaches us and what we see can be affected in a lot of different ways. And anytime that we see something that we can attribute to a state actor, we need to talk about it.”