Fabricated Huawei adverts featuring US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo mislead online
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 17, 2023 at 09:07
- 4 min read
- By Tommy WANG, AFP Hong Kong
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"Thanks to Raimondo from the United States for endorsing Huawei," reads a September 16, 2023, simplified Chinese post on X, formerly Twitter.
The accompanying image appears to show an advertisement with Raimondo holding the latest Huawei handset from its Mate 60 series (archived link).
Simplified Chinese text on the left side of the ad reads: "Raimondo is the global brand ambassador for Huawei."
Another post shared on Weibo on September 20, 2023 includes a different advertisement for the Huawei Mate 60 series and appears to show Raimondo as if she were speaking at a launch event for the handset.
"Raimondo endorses Huawei in person? It must be well-publicised," the post is captioned.
The claim circulated following reports Huawei's Mate 60 Pro handset -- released as Raimondo visited Beijing in late August 2023 in an effort to ease tensions -- was powered by an advanced chip manufactured in China.
The chip breakthrough comes in spite of sweeping restrictions by the United States since 2022 to cut off China's access to high-end semiconductors and chip-making equipment, citing national security concerns.
It also prompted debate about whether the attempts to curb China's technological advancements have been effective.
Since then, Raimondo has told a Congressional hearing in September that she was "upset" by the launch of Huawei's new products but there was no evidence the Chinese tech giant could produce the advanced chips at scale (archived link).
The following month, she called the chip breakthrough "incredibly disturbing" and said her department needed more resources to enforce the US export-control regime to curb Chinese tech advancement, Bloomberg reported (archived link).
The fabricated advertisements were also shared alongside similar false claims on Facebook and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
Comments left on the posts indicated social media users were misled by the adverts.
"Welcome Raimondo, Huawei is grateful to you!" one user said.
"Huawei is really outstanding and amazing on this!" another user commented.
Fabricated advertisements
Combined reverse image and keyword searches on Google of the first advertisement featuring a portrait of Raimondo found it corresponds to a profile photo of the official published on Wikimedia Commons, attributed to the official site of the United States Department of Commerce (archived link).
Additional searches found the same profile photo in an archived version of the Department of Commerce's website.
A further keyword search on Douyin found a post explaining the fabricated Raimondo Huawei endorsement was first created as a joke using a genuine advert for another Chinese smartphone brand, Xiaomi, which features the company's founder Lei Jun (archived link).
Xiaomi is one of Huawei's main competitors (archived link).
AFP found the black turtleneck seen on Raimondo matches the one worn by Lei in the Xiaomi advert (archived link).
Below are screenshot comparisons of the fabricated advert featuring Raimondo (left), the original poster of Xiaomi's Lei Jun (centre) and Raimondo's profile photo on the Department of Commerce site (right):
Reverse image searches found the second fabricated advert misused a Reuters photo of Raimondo (archived link).
The caption of the Reuters photo indicates that it is an image of Raimondo speaking during an interview with the agency on September 23, 2021.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the second fabricated advertisement (left) and the Reuters photo (right):
A close analysis of the two fabricated adverts found they included fake Raimondo signatures.
The signatures distinctly differ from the ones seen in some of the signed documents Raimondo shared on social media, including here and here (archived links here and here).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the fabricated signatures (left, centre) and the authentic signature found in the document Raimondo shared on X (right):
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