| Hi, this is Alyza on Bloomberg's cybersecurity team. As foreign and domestic disinformation continues to proliferate on social media in the U.S., researchers are on high alert for false claims surrounding former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial this week. Trump will be tried on charges that he incited the January riot at the U.S. Capitol, an event that resulted in five deaths and delayed the certification of President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Both the November election and the January riot were fodder for disinformation campaigns, suggesting this week's trial could be leveraged on social media for similar purposes. "We will be on the lookout for impeachment-related disinformation being propagated by suspected foreign state actors during the upcoming trial," Lee Foster, who studies disinformation at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc, said in a statement. "Over recent weeks and months, we have observed such actors seize on domestic political events here in the U.S., including the January 6th Capitol attack, to push anti-democracy narratives and paint the U.S. as a country in chaos and decline." Researchers at the German Marshall Fund have tracked impeachment disinformation spreading on a pro-Trump forum, the chat-app Telegram and Facebook groups. The narratives include conspiracies about the "Deep State" and elections. For example, on Facebook, a post associated with the QAnon community was posted to a political group and an anti-vaccination group. It "claims Trump will initiate a media blackout on Sunday or Monday and then arrest members of the deep state for their crimes," the researchers found. In the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, a network of hundreds of fake Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts devoted to pro-China propaganda spread messages and videos about the riot, according to recent research by the social media analysis firm Graphika. The accounts used the event to push narratives denigrating democracy and—like conventional Chinese media—sought to cast U.S. condemnation of the riot as hypocritical after U.S. officials praised pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Within a day of the Capitol riot, the pro-China accounts began pushing content that included footage of the event: "They point to the turmoil in D.C. as evidence that the democratic system practiced in the United States is in an irreversible state of disintegration and decline," according to the Graphika report, which was published last week. "The videos stressed that the U.S. system is self-evidently too fragile, unable to handle 21st century challenges and especially not suitable for 'export' to other countries." Efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election—which a top U.S. cyber official deemed "the most secure in American history"—were widespread and highly concerning to U.S. intelligence officials, leading the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to set up a website devoted to debunking widespread narratives that were falsely painting the outcome as illegitimate. In terms of impeachment, there is recent precedent for disinformation efforts. When Trump was first tried for impeachment in 2019, for abuse of power and obstructing Congress, a Russia-linked operation used the proceedings to fuel a social media campaign, according to Graphika. In that campaign, Russia-linked accounts spread disinformation about former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who testified in the 2019 impeachment investigation. The accounts sought to weaken Western countries, leveraging "U.S. political stories to cause trouble between America and its allies," the report's author, Ben Nimmo, told me at the time. Foreign accounts may be looking to this week's proceedings to advance other geopolitical objectives. "We anticipate these actors will be monitoring the impeachment trial for material and narratives," Foster said. —Alyza Sebenius | 
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