Texas Civil War Being Pushed In China, New Sci-Fi Movie Affected?

For those who aren’t in the know, the upcoming Civil War movie, directed by Alex Garland and starring Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Nick Offerman, follows a team of journalists who travel across the US during a rapidly escalating second civil war that has engulfed the entire nation. The civil war is led between separatist “Western Forces” led by Texas and California, and the movie documents the journalists’ survival as the government descends into a dystopian dictatorship and various militias commit political violence.

Civil War is already surrounded by various controversies, and many conspiracy theorists now believe that its launch serves as a so-called “predictive programming” used by the shadowed elites to send the message to the population about what the future holds. Add a bit of politics in the mixture and the fact that content from foreign media is often cherry-picked by Chinese bodies to stoke suggestions of US internal divisions, and you get a disinformation campaign that’s now pushed by the Chinese government-controlled media about a Texas civil war that threatens to break the nation.

In fact, popular Chinese outlets have been suggesting that the recent events in Texas over issues with illegal immigration led to deep divisions in the United States, with Texas Governor Greg Abbott allegedly preparing to go to war with US federal authorities or instigating a civil war. Posts with the hashtag #TexasDeclaresAStateOfWar have been published by Chinese media outlets and shared tens of thousands of times over Chinese social media networks, such as Sina Weibo. Some of those posts were made by users with millions of online followers.

So, it’s entirely possible that the ranting of various online conspiracy theorists, paired with the film’s upcoming release and the increased friction between Biden and Abbott regarding illegal immigration, probably served as an additional basis for Chinese online misinformation campaigns about the Texas civil war. But it’s also important to note that the US isn’t the only target of such campaigns. Each time UK politicians become critical of the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese social media becomes flooded with posts suggesting Scotland’s renewed push for self-rule.

Do Chinese misinformation campaigns threaten the Civil War’s release or reception? Of course not. China’s stance on both domestic and international surveillance, as well as media manipulation, is well-known to everybody, and nobody is taking their propaganda seriously. The same cannot be said for the Chinese people, who lack internet access to Western content (China has its own internet) and can’t fact-check theirs. Instead, the Chinese are forced to ingest the feed by their own government-controlled media.

So, no, while Chinese propaganda plays right into the conspiracy theorist narrative regarding the current situation in Texas, it’s not likely to play a factor in the Civil War’s release. Let’s collectively remember that even Salinger’s The Catchers in the Rye has been associated with several high-profile criminal cases, but it hasn’t been pulled from print, and it wasn’t burned in piles on public squares.

Source: BBC News