Cloaked science: the Yan reports

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a 2020 disinformation campaign promoting the unsubstantiated claim that the novel coronavirus is the product of a Chinese bioweapons program. Exploiting a vulnerability in open-access scientific publishing, the campaign was based on papers posted to an online preprint repository designed to accelerate the diffusion of scientific knowledge. This provided the campaign with an air of scientific legitimacy, helped it reach millions of Americans, and muddied public discourse over the origins of SARS-CoV-2. This case study offers insights into the tactics and practices of media manipulation, the contested nature of modern epistemic systems, the interplay of technical and social systems, and the vulnerability of open systems to manipulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication studies
• social media
• politics
• media studies
• social networking

Background

Momentous changes in media dynamics over the past two decades have provided a acessible and affordable platform for non-traditional media actors and citizens to reach a potentially wide audience and to challenge the power of traditional media gatekeepers. This update allows new participants lend their knowledge and expertise to public discourse; but it also offers a vector for those who manipulate media and spread disinformation (Tucker et al., 2018).

Changes in the realm of science have paralleled those in media with many calling for greater openness in processes and communication of science. Among the changes that have been advocated are promoting greater sharing of data and information, relaxing the paywalls that limit distribution of research findings, accelerating the speed at which scientific knowledge enters the public sphere, and loosening the institutional constraints on who can participate in research and knowledge creation (Mudrak, 2020). One answer has been preprints, which are scholarly articles posted online prior to peer review, a rigorous editorial process, and official journal publication. These pre-published and pre-peer reviewed articles meant to allow for access and collaboration.

Findings from The Lancet suggest that in 2020 preprints were driving the conversation about the coronavirus pandemic (Majumder & Mandl, 2020). While the openness of preprints means that scientific communication and collaboration can happen quicker, their openness has led to confusion, mistakes, and exploitation. They also enabled the spread of cloaked science, a term we use to describe the use of scientific jargon and community norms to cloak or hide a political, ideological, or financial agenda within the appearance of legitimate scientific research. Cloaked science can be seeded onto public preprint servers, in data repositories, journals, or publications with lax review standards; it can also be spread through press releases or by baiting journalists who may not be able to scrutinize the research claims thoroughly.

The following case study demonstrates how openness can be a vulnerability: preprints on an open-access platform meant for collaboration and accessibility to scientific advances were manipulated for political gain. The campaign was promoted by American political strategist Steve Bannon and the Chinese billionare Guo Wengui, who used the campain to blame the CCP for the spread of coronavirus. It featured several reports authored by a Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the product of a Chinese bioweapons program and was deliberately released. It contributed to overall public health confusion and the infodemic. The relative novelty of the use of preprints in this media manipulation campaign to push a political agenda heighted the impact of the campaign.

Case study

The Media Manipulation Casebook is a project led by sociologist Joan Donovan, PhD. The Casebook is a research platform that advances knowledge of misinformation, disinformation, and their threats to democracy, public health, and security. The case uses Dr. Donovan’s media manipulation lifecycle theory, which posits that disinformation campaigns move through five stages: origins, seeding, amplification, mitigation, and adaptation.

Stage 1: manipulation campaign planning and origins

Within a few weeks of the novel coronavirus spreading from China to the rest of the world, in early 2020, a pernicious narrative began to take root online: it claimed the SARS-CoV-2 virus was a biological weapon created in a lab (Kasprak, 2020).

In mid-January 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), gave credence to the bioweapon theory during a conversation with her favorite YouTuber, Wang Dinggang. In that conversation, Yan told Wang about what she ‘knew’ about the virus’ human-made origins (Qin et al., 2020). Wang, a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and close associate of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, repeated the conversations on his channel without naming her ‘because officials could make the person disappear’ (Qin et al., 2020). Guo Wengui showed the episode to Steve Bannon, former Breitbart executive and ally of President Donald Trump (Qin et al., 2020). The two have formed an alliance to push their shared anti-CCP agenda.

As doubts about the origins of COVID-19 continued to proliferate across right-wing media networks, Guo and Bannon connected with Yan, marking the beginning of what would become a global media manipulation campaign.

Yan argued that both the Chinese government and the World Health Organization knew about the novel coronavirus earlier than they admitted, and that she had evidence that the true origin of the virus is a lab in Wuhan with close connections to the Chinese Communist Party (Aiyappa, 2020). Many scientists believe that the likeliest scenario is that SARS-CoV-2 has natural origins, but the issue has yet to be decisively resolved and a lab leak origin is possible albeit unlikely (Federman & Engber, 2021). The bioweapon theory has no support in mainstream scientific circles.

While similar claims had been made by others, Yan stands out due to her background in science. Her CV lists a medical degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University and a PhD from Southern Medical University. Yan held a postdoctoral fellowship at Hong Kong University (HKU), where she was the first author on a COVID research paper that was published by Nature – one of the most prestigious biology journals in the world (Sia et al., 2020).

Guo flew Yan to the US on 28 April 2020 (Qin et al., 2020), at a time of active debate over the role of the Chinese government in the origin of the virus.

In late April and early May, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fanned the flames of the January rumor that COVID-19 was produced in a lab (Healy, 2020). Trump contradicted his own intelligence team by saying he had seen evidence and that he had a ‘high degree of confidence’ that it was developed and released in Wuhan (Cohen et al., 2020).

On 10 July 2020, Yan’s story moved from hyperpartisan online news outlets to an interview on Fox News (FOX News, 2020a). During the interview Yan said she was in hiding from the Chinese government and referred to herself as a whistleblower (FOX News, 2020a). A Fox News story about the interview was the first article to use the whistleblower label. (FOX News, 2020a).

The interview garnered a lot of attention online with over 2.7 million views on YouTube and 18K reactions on Facebook. The video has since been removed from Facebook but remains on YouTube. The day after this interview, HKU put out a press release refuting what Yan told Fox News about her research (HKU Responds to the Media Concerning a Former Staff Member’s TV Interview, 2020).

On September 9, Yan repeated her claims to Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of the conservative news site National Pulse and co-host of Bannon’s popular podcast and YouTube show War Room Pandemic, (The National Pulse, 2020). On September 11, Yan told Loose Women, a British talk show, that she would publish the evidence of the virus's lab origins (Loose Women, 2020). The interview is available on YouTube, and has over 1.4M views (Loose Women, 2020).

Yan, Guo, and Bannon were able to effectively employ two common tactics of media manipulation campaigns: exploiting an active crisis and leveraging an existing wedge issue, in this case mistrust of the CCP. However, reporters were still skeptical of Yan's claims and comments across social media repeatedly clamored for evidence.A New York Post tweet publicizing Dr. Yan’s claims days before she uploaded her preprint.

Stage 2: seeding campaign across Social platforms and web

This publicity put Yan’s name into circulation in the US, and primed the public for the next phase of the campaign: the release of a preprint scientific paper, which exploited the vulnerability of open science to further muddy the waters about the origin of COVID-19 and push an anti-CCP narrative.

On 14 September 2020, Yan, along with three listed co-authors, released a preprint paper on the open-access research data repository Zenodo: ‘Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route’ (Yan et al., 2020a). The title captures the gist of the paper: it claims that COVID-19 was created in a lab. Yan joined Twitter and tweeted the Zenodo link to her preprint (Murdock, 2020). The paper became informally known as the Yan Report.

Yan’s choices – to release the paper as a preprint, and to use Zenodo as the terrain to disseminate it – appear strategic. Zenodo is hosted at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and funded by OpenAIRE and the European Commission. Uploads to Zenodo are automatically assigned a DOI (Document Object Indicator), which gives it a baseline-level of legitimacy and a way for other scientists to cite it. Additionally, in contrast to other preprint repositories such as bioRxiv, Zenodo is designed so that anyone with an email address can upload a paper. Rather than an academic institution,Yan listed her affiliation on her Zenodo paper as Bannon and Guo’s Rule of Law Foundation and Rule of Law Society.

The speed of open science meant that Yan’s preprint could travel far – quickly. On the day of its publication, Twitter mentions of Yan’s report were made by India’s WION News (292.5K followers), India's News18 (4.5M followers), and right-wing accounts such as ZeroHedge (842K followers).

According to a capture by the Internet Archive, Yan’s preprint had 156,769 views and 104,708 downloads on the day it was uploaded to Zenodo, making it instantly one of Zenodo’s most popular papers about COVID-19.

Stage 3: responses by industry, activists, politicians, and journalists

On September 15, the day after publication, Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Carlson posted the clip of Yan’s appearance to Facebook and tweeted it. On Facebook, it had 73K reactions, 16K comments, and 78K shares at the time of writing (FOX News, 2020c); the second most prominent Fox News story that day paled in comparison: it had 2.3k engagements (Facebook, 2020). On Twitter, the Carlson clip has 56K likes and 27K retweets (Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson), 2020). The interview, also uploaded to YouTube, has over 2.8M views (FOX News, 2020c).

On the day of the Carlson interview, Yan uploaded her publication to ResearchGate (Yan, 2020), another open repository of academic work. Having the preprint on other repositories increases the likelihood that someone searching online would find the paper, and redundancy acts as a backup in case it is removed from one site. By September 16, the views on her Zenodo paper had reached 404,163, per the Internet Archive.

Two days after Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, Bannon went on it. There he discussed Yan and her paper (Kuznia et al., 2020). Bannon also frequently interviewed Yan on his podcast War Room: Pandemic where she appeared 11 times between 28 July and 2 October 2020.

A Tucker Carlson tweet that links to a clip from his interview with Yan.

A tweet by Peter Navarro that links to the Yan Report.

Conservative news sites, such as National Review, covered the Yan Report uncritically (Geraghty, 2020). It also received international media exposure via reporting by Australia’s News.com.au (Loomes, 2020), Spain’s AS English (Micó, 2020), and India’s WION (WION Web Team, 2020).

Interview clips, commentary, and links were shared as Facebook posts, tweets, and retweets by Senator Marsha Blackburn, Rev. Franklin Graham, and then-President Trump, signifying a degree of political adoption within the president’s party (Qin et al., 2020). By arguing that COVID-19 was designed in a Chinese lab, the Yan Report affirmed Trump’s repeated claim that ‘it’s China’s fault’ (Lopez, 2020). The adoption of the story by political allies is a key milestone in successful media manipulation efforts, our research shows.

Stage 4: mitigation efforts

The media attention to the Yan Report prompted academic scientists to issue refutations of the preprint, which was then covered by critical press. The prevailing scientific and journalistic writings appear to conclude that the content of Yan’s preprint is not credible (Brouillette & Renner, 2020; Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, 2020; Wu, 2020).

In an interview with National Geographic, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, explained that Yan’s paper ‘looks legitimate because they use a lot of technical jargon. But in reality, a lot of what they’re saying doesn’t really make any sense’ (Brouillette & Renner, 2020). The Yan Report was also subject to a critical review by scientists at MIT, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon University (Brouillette & Renner, 2020), and the University of Washington, which found that Yan’s science was neither legible nor reproducible (Wu, 2020).

Following the critical press and debunking, Twitter suspended Yan’s Twitter account two days after she created it to share the preprint. Facebook and Instagram added warnings to Tucker Carlson’s posts about his interview with Yan. YouTube videos – from Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and Loose Women – all have a small banner across the bottom with an option to view CDC information.

Screenshot of Tucker Carlson’s Facebook post sharing his interview with Yan.

Social media moderation, however, did not quell interest in the paper. After attempts by the platforms to reduce the report’s spread, Infowars posted an article saying that Facebook had ‘censored’ the Tucker Carlson interview (McBreen, 2020).

Yan has claimed that censorship kept her work at the preprint stage (Yan et al., 2020a). These claims of censorship echo media manipulation strategies that make unfounded claims about bias in order to create an aura of illicit information (Sauter, 2017).

In an interview with Zenodo representatives, the team told us that they weighed removing the preprint from the repository but said that removing it would have been antithetical to the spirit of their platform and inconsistent with their terms of service (2020). They maintained Zenodo is a platform where scientific conversation can begin. Keeping the Yan Report online means that it can be discussed and cited by scientists who dispute the findings.

Screenshot of Tucker Carlson’s Instagram post labeled by fact-checkers.

Stage 5: adjustments by campaign operators

Yan published a second paper on 8 October 2020b. The title of this second paper is blunter: ‘SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud.’

This second paper was uploaded to Zenodo, but unlike the first one, was not accepted to the site’s Coronavirus Disease Research Community – COVID-19. After that, it remained on the site without categorization.

As part of her tactical adjustment, Yan created a second Twitter account to tweet her preprint. During the observation period, it received 16.3K likes and 14K retweets and quote tweets (@DrLiMengYAN1, 2020). It was immediately shared by right-wing Twitter accounts, such as ZeroHedge, which posted the link along with a mention of how quickly Yan’s account was removed after her last paper. Anticipating platform moderation, Yan tweeted a link to her account on Gab, a moderation-free alternative to Twitter that portrays itself as a bastion of free speech (should her second Twitter account be removed).

As of 10 February 2021, the Yan Report had 1,043,337 views and 735,879 downloads (Yan et al., 2020b). Her second paper has 229,918 views on Zenodo and has been downloaded 117,651 times (Yan et al., 2020b).

Conclusion

As the case demonstrates, when hoax science becomes networked, it is much more quickly seen by the press and taken up by the public. Further, the speed and visibility leaves databases much more vulnerable to information attacks. As a result of the attention that the Yan Report received, Zenodo shifted course and placed a label on the article – a first for the site.

In late June, Bannon appeared on Timcast, a YouTube talk show and said, ‘leave the reports aside’ when asked about Dr. Yan (Timcast IRL, 2021). The implication here was that the fact-checks and warning label had significantly discredited the manipulation campiang. Perhaps the efforts to debunk the Yan reports and shine light on the disinformation campaign behind them may have diminished their usefulness. The fact of the matter is that we do not know the origin of the COVID-19 virus, but the generation and planting of cloaked science is a politically powerful maneuver when it leverages the openness and scale of social media, preprint repositories, and the internet.

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Nilsen

Jennifer Nilsen, MPP is a Researcher at Technology and Social Change Research Project at Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Joan Donovan

Joan Donovan, PhD is Research Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Rob Faris

Rob Faris, PhD is a Senior Researcher at Technology and Social Change Research Project at Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University