Recently, the largest U.S. fuel pipeline operator shut down a major pipeline after a cyber attack.
The largest U.S. fuel pipeline operator has shut down a major pipeline after a cyber attack. The U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency statement in response. But the Chinese Communist Party’s media fabricated a rumor that “the U.S. has declared a state of national emergency,” a topic with nearly 300 million reads on Weibo. Sohu.com has 4.7 billion readers.
The Chinese Communist Party media reported that the U.S. declared a national emergency on May 9, local time, because the largest local fuel pipeline operator was taken offline by a cyber attack.
The report referred to the U.S. company Colonial Pipeline. The company is the largest operator of fuel oil and gas pipelines in the United States, and was forced to temporarily shut down a pipeline on the 7th due to a hacking attack.
The pipeline, which starts in the southwest in Texas and runs northeast across 17 states to New Jersey, carries processed Gulf of Mexico oil and gas resources and is responsible for 45 percent of the U.S. East Coast’s oil and gas supply.
(Web Screenshot)
On May 9, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a “regional emergency declaration” that eased restrictions on fuel transportation in 17 eastern and southern states in an effort to ensure local fuel supplies.
The Chinese Communist Party’s Sohu and other websites reported in an article titled “U.S. enters national emergency because of a pipeline, is the superpower so vulnerable? The report said that the U.S. has entered another state of emergency.
The report ridiculed that the shutdown of a pipeline has led to a state of emergency in a third of the U.S. states, how “fragile” is the superpower U.S.? What kind of situation would lead to a state of emergency?
(Web screenshot)
According to NBC 10, the major oil pipeline in the United States has been shut down due to a cyber attack on the Clonier Pipeline Transportation Company.
Biden held a news conference at the White House on the same day, saying the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is involved in the investigation of the incident, and said the Department of Transportation issued an emergency order easing restrictions on truckers to allow more fuel to be transported via tanker trucks.
Biden added: “The Department of Energy is working directly with Colonyer to get the pipeline back to work and back to full capacity as quickly and safely as possible.”
On the same day, DarkSide, the group suspected of launching the cyberattack, issued a press release stating that their “goal is to make money. However, the press release did not directly mention that DarkSide had launched the attack.
Although the U.S. has not declared a “national emergency,” the Chinese Communist Party and official media have not mentioned the attack directly. However, the Communist Party, official, online and self-published media have said that the U.S. “declared a national emergency,” and a few of them have said that Biden declared “a national emergency in the United States.
(Screenshot from Weibo)
On mainland Weibo, the topic had been read by 290 million people and discussed 6,228 times by 11 p.m. Beijing time on May 11. Many of the posts were gloating.
(Screenshot from Weibo)
Radio Free Asia quoted Zhang, a researcher specializing in journalism, as analyzing that amid growing radical nationalism among Chinese citizens, the Communist Party’s media is more inclined to spread false information that reflects a negative image of the West.
At the audience level, the vast majority of audiences inside China are more likely to believe news that fits the caliber of the official media because of the monopoly of information channels by the Communist Party, he said. So within the country, publishing news that is more in line with Western caliber and not in line with the caliber of CCTV or People’s Daily is also unpalatable at the audience level.
So it’s a realistically more prudent option for both the self-published and professional media to republish such inaccurate news.
He says that because the Communist Party has a monopoly on fact-checking, publishing and interpretation, including the right to eliminate inaccurate information and to punish the publishers. But according to the Western academic definition, the rumors spread by the Communist media this time should be called “false information.
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