When people talk about foreign influence operations, Russia is usually the first country that comes to mind. We picture troll factories, aggressive TV shows or conspiracy theories spreading on social media.
But a study published this June by Viginum, France’s national agency for countering foreign digital interference, describes a very different approach. At its centre is not loud propaganda, but an entire network of news portals that look like ordinary media outlets and focus mainly on how successful, innovative and essential to the world China supposedly is.
According to Viginum, the network consisted of 13 websites operated by China’s state broadcaster CGTN, or China Global Television Network. The portals published articles in English, French, Spanish and Vietnamese, presenting themselves as independent media outlets. In reality, they were part of a coordinated influence operation, which French authorities named Fawn Mianju.
This is not a story about isolated fake news. It is a story about how propaganda is increasingly being made to look like real journalism.
A pedestrian walks past the office building housing the European headquarters of China’s state broadcaster CGTN in Chiswick Park, London, in 2021. Photo: Tolga Akmen / AFP.
Source: screenshot.
13 portals that did not look like propaganda
One of the best-known portals in the network was called Actu Méridien. It was a French-language website that looked just like an ordinary news outlet. The same network also included the Spanish-language Amigo News, English-language sites and Vietnamese-language publications.
The content of these sites did not focus on criticising the West. Quite the opposite. Readers were told about China’s achievements in aviation and artificial intelligence, Beijing’s leading role in the Global South, and how European countries could benefit from closer cooperation with China. One article, for example, attacked a programme by the French TV channel France 2 that covered the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
This is exactly what sets Chinese influence operations apart from Russia’s. While Russian propaganda is often dominated by conflict, threat perception and confrontation, China’s goal is to build a positive image of itself. Freedom House describes this as a long-term strategy aimed at “telling China’s story well”. At its core is the image of China as a successful, trustworthy and indispensable partner.
Freedom House notes that in France, Chinese state media has for years tried to influence public opinion not only through its own channels, but also through partnerships, paid content and social media influencers. These have included both Facebook influencers and traditional media outlets that have published paid supplements from Chinese state media.
AI wrote, people read
The most interesting part of the story, however, is the role played by artificial intelligence. According to Viginum’s investigation, since late 2025 CGTN published nearly 3,000 articles, more than 2,300 of which were quickly adapted and republished on other websites in the network. This often happened less than an hour after the original story appeared.
The articles were not copied word for word. The texts were edited, shortened, adapted for different target audiences and rewritten so that they appeared to be original content. Investigators found that the texts showed unusually little natural variation in sentence length and punctuation. This is one of the signs associated with automatically generated or AI-assisted content.
Domino Theory writes that some of the articles were aimed specifically at younger audiences, with large language models, or LLMs, used to make the content more engaging and adapt it to a particular country or language space.
In other words, AI was not used only to increase productivity. It was used to spread the same message quickly and cheaply in dozens of different forms and across different languages.
One mistake led back to CGTN
The strongest evidence linking the network to China’s state broadcaster came from an unexpected place. The administrator of one portal, Actu Méridien, left behind a login trail that led Viginum investigators to a senior project manager at CGTN Digital.
In addition, investigators found a hidden webpage on Actu Méridien’s server that had been built to resemble CGTN’s official website.
An anonymous Viginum analyst told Le Monde that the portal’s technical setup pointed to “a well-resourced actor”. The website was not running on a single server, but used a distributed architecture, professional SEO tools and several different infrastructure components.
Thirteen fake news websites launched in 2025 systematically spread pro-China content. An investigation by Viginum, France’s national agency for countering foreign digital interference, found that they were directly linked to China’s state broadcaster CGTN.
Author: William Audureau. Source: screenshot.
Investigators also found a link to the administrator’s GitHub account. It contained projects related to connecting websites with large language models and automating AI-generated content.
These details do not merely prove one person’s involvement. They also give a fairly clear picture of what a modern influence operation can look like. State media produces the original material. AI adapts it for different target audiences. Websites that appear independent republish it, while social media accounts help spread the content.
Source: screenshot.
Still, it did not become successful propaganda
Perhaps the most surprising part is that, despite the scale of the effort, the operation was not particularly successful. The network was supported by Facebook and Threads accounts, and advertising campaigns were shown to users in as many as 89 countries. Yet individual articles usually received no more than around 15,000 views.
According to Le Monde, a significant share of social media reactions came from Burundi, and there were reasons to believe that some of the activity was not authentic. Domino Theory quotes Le Monde’s assessment that the entire operation could even be described as an “operational failure”.
Still, this does not mean the phenomenon should be underestimated.
Freedom House notes in its overview that China’s previous influence attempts in France have often failed precisely because they were either too aggressive or too transparent. At the same time, the report stresses that Chinese state media has considerable financial resources and the ability to change its strategies quickly.
The authors of the report warn that in the future, Chinese state media may take inspiration from Russian channels, which have learned to skilfully amplify local social disputes and present them through a foreign lens.
The new face of propaganda
The network uncovered in France shows that influence operations no longer have to look like propaganda.
There is no need for loud voices, militant slogans or obvious fake news. A website that resembles an ordinary news portal is enough. An article about China’s green transition or technological success is enough. And so is artificial intelligence that can adapt the same message for dozens of different target audiences within minutes.
The question is no longer only whether a news story is true or false. The question is who is telling stories about the world, what kinds of stories are being told, and whether the reader even notices that the “news” in front of them was not produced in an independent newsroom, but far away in Beijing.
