Overview
The Yan Report is a misleading article masquerading as science, which falsely claims that the novel coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. An example of cloaked science, it was released during a time of intense uncertainty; as scientists raced for answers about COVID-19, sharing unvetted data as preprints in open science repositories became an essential mode of international collaboration. The increasing openness of the scientific community, though, is a vulnerability that can be leveraged by media manipulators, especially during times of crisis. On April 28, 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), fled to the United States with support from Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui. They used Yan’s story — that she was a whistleblower — to exploit the contentious wedge issue of the unknown origin of COVID-19.
This media manipulation campaign involved planting misleading evidence into the scientific literature, muddying the waters about COVID-19 and providing the veneer of scientific legitimacy for the political claim that coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon. Subsequently, the Yan Report was amplified through right-wing media networks, leading to nearly a million views of the report on Zenodo, an open-access research data repository. While social media platforms moderated information about the Yan Report after scientists at several universities debunked it, two follow-up Yan Reports were uploaded to open science repositories that even more bluntly pushed the bioweapon narrative, while also refuting the academic responses to the first report. Seeding the Yan reports in the scientific community as cloaked science allowed those who linked to them on social media to claim legitimacy, while also providing the empirical basis for furthering the political aims of the funders of the reports.
Stage 1: Manipulation Campaign Planning and Origins
Within a few weeks of the novel coronavirus spreading from China to the rest of the world, a pernicious narrative began to take root online: the suggestion that the virus SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon created in a lab.1
In mid-January 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), gave credence to this idea when she told her favorite YouTuber — Wang Dinggang, a vocal critic of the Chinese government, and close associate of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui2 — about rumors she had heard about the virus’ origins. Wang repeated the conversations on his channel without naming her “because officials could make the person disappear. ”3
On January 25, 2020, a hyperpartisan news outlet called G News published an article further pushing the bioweapon conspiracy theory. It was titled, “Breaking news: China will admit coronavirus coming from its P4 lab.”4 G News was not the only media outlet pushing the narrative, but its involvement was significant because G News is a media outlet associated with Guo and Steve Bannon, former Breitbart executive and ally of President Trump. The two have formed a partisan alliance to push their shared anti-CCP agenda through the Rule of Law Foundation and the Rule of Law Society, which they founded in October 2017.5 Funded by Guo and managed by Bannon, Rule of Law aims to “protect and assist individuals victimized in China, particularly those penalized for speaking out against injustice.”6 Guo and Bannon were drawn together because both “naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),”7 according to Guo. They also both have media backgrounds. Bannon was previously Trump's chief strategist, and, before that he ran the right-wing news site Breitbart. Guo founded and funds G Media,8 which often posts anti-CCP stories across social media platforms, and prominently on the social media platform, Parler.
Prior to the first Yan report being released, Bannon said Wang’s YouTube episode featuring Yan was shown to and translated for him.9 As doubts about the origins of COVID-19 continued to proliferate across right-wing media networks, Guo and Bannon connected with Yan. This is when the pieces fell into place for what would become the Yan Report media manipulation campaign.
In interviews, Yan had been arguing that both China and the World Health Organization knew about the novel coronavirus earlier than they admitted. This is not a unique claim. Similar narratives, for example, were also circulating using the hashtag #chinaliedpeopledied, which went viral in March and April 2020.10 Yan put forward that she had evidence that the notion that the virus transferred from animals to humans was a “smokescreen” to hide its true orig... 查看完整评论
