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An investigation of 30 TikTok accounts found a factory-like system behind over 550 videos. Nearly all (98 per cent) were assembled by taking AI-generated, manipulated or copied female personas …Nearly nine in 10 videos pushed false or misleading claims about Singapore and Malaysia, drawing more than 3 million views in total.

Between October 2025 and June 2026, they repeatedly advanced a worldview where Singapore’s fortunes were dictated by China. The narratives blended fact, distortion and outright invention: The most outlandish one claimed that Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan had unsuccessfully begged China and Indonesia not to let a new shipping route bypass Singapore’s port. No such thing happened.

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The videos’ creators’ … use genuine news as hooks for baseless claims. One alleged that Singapore’s port dominance was about to “collapse” now that China’s Hainan Free Trade Port had become fully operational in December. Another seized on an unrelated event, ExxonMobil’s Singapore plant closure, as supposed proof of Singapore’s decline.

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Another set of [Tiktok] videos used the same tactic – of trying to blur the line between truth and falsehood – by leaning on how Singapore has been China’s largest foreign investor since 2013. This real statistic served, however, as the foundation for subsequently arguing that Singapore had prospered by aligning itself with China’s rise, and for implying that other countries should do the same.

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But Singapore is not the only target of the disinformation campaign.

Where the Singapore-focused claims cast China as a patron, the Malaysia ones took on a more contentious framing, with several blaming the country’s allegedly slower development on policies that sidelined its ethnic Chinese population.

The goal appears to be to erode trust and fracture social cohesion, said Associate Professor Saifuddin Ahmed from Nanyang Technological University (NTU)’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.

“Any audience that grows to distrust its own government’s narrative is more susceptible to external influence over time,” he added.

The experts also suggested that beyond domestic Singapore and Malaysia audiences, the global Mandarin-speaking diaspora could be a target. There is strategic value, for instance, in attempting to shape how investors might perceive the stability and political orientation of the two countries, said Assoc Prof Saifuddin.

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“TikTok’s short-form, high-volume format means users encounter the same narratives repeatedly across different accounts without necessarily recognising it as a coordinated campaign,” Assoc Prof Saifuddin explained. “That repetition alone, independent of content quality, increases the likelihood that claims feel familiar and therefore plausible.”

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The same tactic has been observed in previously documented influence as well as marketing campaigns. According to reports in 2024, Chinese state-linked groups had targeted the Taiwanese elections that year with AI-generated news anchors. And in June this year, a network of fake female dating profiles were found pushing propaganda ahead of local polls in Taiwan.

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Asked about the effectiveness of the videos, Assoc Prof Saifuddin said that “view counts tell you about reach, not about whether minds were actually changed”.

But he also reiterated that the operation “doesn’t need to convince people outright; it just needs to make certain framings feel familiar and recurring”.

The use of Mandarin is also a factor, with fact-checking and debunking efforts in this space lagging behind English-language cases, said Mr Benjamin Ang, who heads the centre of excellence for national security at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) think-tank.

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