The Government of Canada on Monday morning issued a statement confirming a Beijing-led “information operation on WeChat” to get Liberal leader Mark Carney elected.
Carney, as the Western Standard earlier reported, has a history of deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including a $256 million loan on behalf of Brookfield Asset Management, a global holding company Carney chaired until January 2025.
Articles posted by the Youli-Youmian WeChat account, China’s main social media platform, single out Carney — first for “amplifying” the Liberal leader’s stance against the United States, and then highlighting his “experience and credentials,” said Canadian intelligence in a statement.
The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force says “bot-like WeChat news accounts appear dedicated to amplifying content from the Youli-Youmian account.”
“These accounts do not post original content, and often re-post Youli-Youmian content in a sequence, and only minutes apart. Some of the bot-like accounts continue to re-post Youli-Youmian content days after it was originally posted, likely to improve discoverability of the article, and boosting Youli-Youmian’s presence in user feeds,” said the statement.
“Intelligence reporting links the Youli-Youmian account to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission."
SITE says this information operation was “intended to influence Canadian-Chinese communities in Canada (i.e. speakers of a Chinese language, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka) and looked to mold perceptions” about Carney.
The CCP-Carney campaign “received high levels of user engagement and views,” said SITE, estimating amplified Carney articles got between 85,000 and 130,000 interactions, and up to three million views.
These numbers are significantly higher than state media outlets like the People’s Daily that average only 30,000 interactions per post.
The same Youli-Youmian account, which in an anonymous and popular blog, was also responsible for targeting Conservative MP Michael Chong in June 2023 and Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland in January 2025.