AI agent footage misrepresented as China-linked bots targeting South Korea

"Disgusting," reads the Korean-language caption of a video shared March 8, 2025 on Facebook.

The footage shows around two dozen social media accounts running on a single computer, purportedly functioning autonomously through artificial intelligence. 

Text above and below the clip reads: "A Chinese workshop manipulating South Korean public opinion. AI program which automatically posts comments."

The video spread online after Yoon amplified unfounded claims of Chinese interference in South Korean elections during his impeachment trial (archived link).

The president and his lawyers raised the allegations to justify deploying troops to the country's election commission headquarters during a failed martial law bid in December 2024.

Image

Screenshot of the false claim shared on Facebook captured March 14, 2025

Yoon's impeachment has inflamed anti-Chinese sentiment among his supporters, who have shared multiple false or misleading claims online alleging Chinese meddling in South Korea's political crisis.

The same video circulated alongside similar allegations on Threads and Instagram. 

But the video is unrelated to South Korea.

AI agent

A reverse image search on Google found X user Leon.Y first posted the clip on March 6 (archived link).

He said in the post that he used Chinese AI agent Manus, which has made waves since its release in March, to create a workflow to perform various work tasks (archived link). He also linked to Manus's website.

"As shown in the video: I am still researching the use of agents to assist mobile work, such as social media matrices, such as data analysis of wallets, exchanges and browsers," he wrote.

The same footage spread in posts in multiple languages about Manus, an AI agent generally considered more advanced than a chatbot (archived links here and here). 

Manus says on its website that it can do everything from analysing the stock market to creating a personalised travel handbook for a trip with simple user instructions.

Leon.Y told AFP on X that he "made an (AI) agent that can autonomously browse and comment and retweet posts on X" and that it "can work on numerous accounts at the same time" (archived link).

Leon.Y describes himself as the CEO of a cryptocurrency investment fund "focused on investing in Web3 projects," according to its website (archived link).

After his video gained wide traction online, Leon.Y replied to many other users asking about the video. Nowhere does he mention South Korea. 

Manoj Harjani, a research fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told AFP that while the footage purports to show Manus operating several social media accounts concurrently, "whether this translates into the ability to run a coordinated disinformation campaign remains to be seen."

Harjani said orchestrating such a campaign may require more advanced tactics, but that the system is still in its early stages and continues to improve (archived link).

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about the South Korean political crisis here.