This Philly-area journalist criticized the Chinese government. Then they targeted his daughter.
Deng Yuwen settled in the Philadelphia area after being expelled from his home country for criticizing its authoritarian government.
When dissident journalist Deng Yuwen became the target of an aggressive online harassment campaign over the winter, he had little doubt that the slew of social media accounts calling him a plagiarist and a traitor were tied to the Chinese Communist Party.
After Deng was expelled from his home country in 2018 for criticizing its authoritarian government, he settled in the Philadelphia region.
But although Deng, who is now 56, believed that life in the United States would offer his family protection, he was shocked to find that in addition to himself, the accounts were unloading their aggravation on an unsuspecting target: his 16-year-old daughter.
In February, social media profiles with fake identities that researchers say are linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda arm began circulating thousands of intimidating messages and digitally altered images on X (formerly Twitter) and other platforms with disparaging and sexualized messages about the teenager, including one that calls for violence against her.
The messages frequently contained the name of the Camden County middle school that his daughter had attended — and in some instances, were posted directly in the replies section of that school’s social media pages. Many of the posts are still visible on X.
The Chinese government’s harassment of a minor living in the United States has led researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub to sound alarm bells, suggesting that the government of party leader Xi Jinping is escalating its efforts to silence its loudest critics. The Chinese embassy to the United States did not return a request for comment.
For Deng, who remains troubled by the harassment, the campaign is also a sign that his advocacy for free speech and a China unshackled from authoritarian rule is echoing in Beijing.
“I’m very angry, and meanwhile, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Deng said through a Mandarin interpreter at his home. “On the other hand, it proves I’m valuable enough for them to attack.”
‘The job of the account is to attack somebody.’
Targeted Chinese harassment campaigns have become increasingly brazen in recent years; after then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support for Hong Kong’s democracy movement in 2019, for example, the current Sixers president’s social media was flooded with threatening posts from troll accounts linked to the country.
But Deng considered his family off limits. The journalist has a limited internet presence, and said he learned of his daughter’s harassment only after staff from her school alerted him.
Bot accounts, many of them without any followers and with Americanized names, were posting thousands of intimidating messages about the teen, who declined to comment. Those that appeared in English were written in stilted phrasing and rife with grammatical errors, a hallmark of a foreign influence campaign.
Researchers at Clemson, which is in South Carolina, found that accounts with the government-linked propaganda network, Spamouflage, had circulated more than 5,000 of the posts, with content appearing on websites such as Facebook, Medium, and Tripadvisor as well as Patch, a local news site.
“In the past, if the government attacked any individual on Twitter, you would see the name, it was actually a real account,” Deng said. “But right now, you click on the person, there’s no followers. The job of the account is to attack somebody.”
Other posts took the harassment to shocking extremes. Several advertised sex work and provided contact information. Another, posted to X in May, listed a “bounty” of $8,000 for anyone who could “successfully harm” her.
‘You’re not going to talk about it’
After analyzing Deng’s harassment, Darren Linvill, a propaganda researcher and founder of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, said he was positive the campaign originated in China.
Linvill formed his team in 2017 following the allegations that Russia had used platforms to influence the U.S. election the previous year. Authoritarian propaganda tactics can vary widely, he said.
Russia, for example, attempts to sow confusion by flooding platforms with false and misleading information, while the Chinese government focuses on suppression. That includes conversations about Taiwan’s independence, pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, and the government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims.
Deng’s criticism of the Communist Party varied enough that it was not clear what triggered the harassment, though he suspects it stemmed from comments he made earlier this year comparing top officials in Xi’s government to those under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong.
“China tries to demote ideas,” Linvill said. “If they don’t want you talking about something, you’re not going to talk about it.”
Linvill’s team has since urged social media companies to remove the harassment. Meta, which operates Facebook, has taken down the content in recent months. A Meta spokesperson said the company included Spamouflage in its annual threat report last year and has linked the network to Chinese law enforcement.
But posts remain elsewhere. A spokesperson for X did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Like it was in a dream’
It wasn’t always this way for Deng.
Barring the most extreme criticisms, Deng said he enjoyed the freedom to largely write as he wished during the 2000s; the journalist was then serving as a deputy editor of Study Times, a scholastic journal associated with a Chinese state-run school.
“Those are luxury times, golden times compared to the way things are in China today,” Deng said. “Talking about it, it feels like it was in a dream.”
But about the time of Xi’s ascent to power in the early 2010s, the government began to rein in press freedoms, something Deng would experience in 2012 when he published a Study Times piece critical of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.
The piece drew the attention of international media — and his bosses at the party school, who told him not to repeat himself. He would last another year; after Deng published an article criticizing China’s embrace of North Korea and its then-nascent nuclear program, he was fired.
English-language media have since become a haven for Deng, and his commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy magazine, the U.S. news outlet Voice of America, and on European broadcast networks.
New York City was Deng’s initial destination when settling his family in the United States, though concerns over affordable housing led him to a Camden County community with a large and welcoming Chinese diaspora.
“It’s much more relaxed, I’m sending my articles to the U.S. and Germany and Taiwan,” he said. “I don’t feel any restrictions.”
Still, the harassment campaign has yet to cease. After Deng spoke with the New York Times in June, more posts appeared. What has waned, however, is his daughter’s anger over the experience, he said. The fallout is a “cold fact” of his line of work, Deng said he explained to her.
“The way they harassed me is not going to change how I write my articles,” Deng said. “They’re not going to hinder me in any way.”