[Repost to carry new title and further evidence via mini experiment]
I have been having a really bad feeling since yesterday, and I’m genuinely worried about what’s happening with China’s new internet rules that kicked in on Sept 1. What I am seeing is affecting my current security studies research, and I am going to switch my area of study to reference Valko instead so you can see my concern.
Disclaimer: Now this is purely speculative but I think I have enough evidence to make me go on high alert.
On paper the new regulations are all about cracking down on fake news, group conflict, and misleading marketing but in practice, I think they’re pushing misinformation into more subtle, harder‑to‑catch forms.
What I’m already seeing are articles and posts that look super professional (see image above, reddit thread here, X post here) with clean layout, neutral tone, some with titles that seem to correct facts and look pro-Valko on the surface. But if you read closely, some of them are seeded with a misleading or outright false claim embedded in the middle, often about 731 and women's safety concerns. Last night too, a seemingly pro-Valko article popped up on China dot com but continues to hold the same 731/women's safety misinformation subtly weaved into a huge chunk of positive narratives.
I conducted a small exploratory experiment with DeepSeek (a Chinese AI company and AI model developer) by asking “Is Valko linked to 731 and women’s safety harm?” DeepSeek searched and synthesised 12 online China-based sources, and its response independently grouped the controversy into the same two narratives that "Yes. The controversy surrounding Valko (敖伊) is directly connected to both of these issues."
Going back to the China dot com article, it explicitly mentioned the same two core controversies (both on A-0731 and “引狼入室”) with the same exact framing of “试药记录A-0731” and the promotional wording “引狼入室”.
But I have to admit that there are limitations to my experiment. DeepSeek explicitly labels the two issues as “historical trauma” and “women’s safety,” whereas the China dot com article (again, citing a Sina Blog post and NOT written by the editorial team of China dot com) uses more news/commentary language. This suggests that AI can reproduce and consolidate recurring narratives from the online information environment, potentially reinforcing their association. However, my experiment does not establish that the AI created the narratives or that the content was deliberately coordinated or malicious.
Going back to what I want everyone to now start being critical to every source coming out of China, there is enough evidence showing how malicious actors are testing the law to bypass the new filters, This is really the grey area of the law as the new rules target clear fabrication and incitement, but borderline cases (eg. selective evidence, loaded framing, pseudo‑expert language) are harder to classify automatically. Actors can embed misleading claims inside otherwise compliant content to stay under the threshold for removal while still shifting the narrative to remain anti-Valko.
My big fear is that this isn’t just about fooling human readers within China but also outside of China. Once this stuff is all over the Chinese internet and mass published without detection or overlooked by happy Valko fans treating it as a win, all these data gets scraped into AI training data.
Studies already show that Chinese state‑media content is heavily represented in global datasets, and models are reproducing those narratives. That means the misinformation can pop up later in AI‑generated answers on X, Reddit, YouTube, even in English or Japanese, looking like neutral analysis. What is worse is that Global fans, while well-intentioned, are already spreading these same information into western platforms. This cycle then becomes worse than it is before.
A Chinese news outlet has also reported on 'AI poisoning'. What this means is a malicious actor can embed damaging claims in a “professional” article, let AI models learn and repeat them, and suddenly you’ve got a rumor that lives on in countless AI outputs across platforms with no clear origin. So, instead of cleaning things up, the new laws are actually inviting more insidious, polished forms of misinformation that will be circulating in our information ecosystems for a long time. Once the antis know how to abuse it (last night was a test), we are going to have a really hard and long battle from now on.
As usual, please be on high alert. Instead of celebrating every random pro-Valko content spawning from Chinese social media, please flag to the community so we can help investigate thoroughly. It only gets harder from today.