by Jacob Grandstaff
Chinese-owned NewsBreak provides the Chinese Communist Party the ability to highlight chaos and amplify conspiracies and discord among Americans through its news content and comment sections. The app boasts 50 million monthly users and became the top-ranked app in the News category on Google Play in 2021.
NewsBreak claims to fill the gap created by the loss of tens of thousands of newsroom jobs and the closing of most countywide newspapers, but this overnight success comes with shoddy and subversive tactics to gain unfair market advantages and influence in the U.S. The real goal of the CCP-owned app is more subversive.
Users can click on a “local” tab in the app that aggregates local news from over 10,000 sources, including national media outlets, local TV stations, local blogs, and independent contributors.
Jeff Zheng, former head of Yahoo Labs in Beijing, founded NewsBreak in Mountain View, California in 2015. Zheng is a Chinese citizen with permanent residency in the U.S. He started the company as a subsidiary of the popular Chinese news aggregation app Yidian Zixun, which he co-founded with a former Baidu executive. Yidian accustomed hundreds of millions of Chinese news consumers to follow machine-recommended articles rather than human-curated content, success Zheng sought to replicate in the U.S.
Success came in 2020, when over 50 million people downloaded the NewsBreak app—99 percent of whom lived in the U.S. Much of that success came because of aggressive advertising backed by CCP-connected Chinese capital. By 2020, the company had already raised $20 million. Additionally, the app forced itself on many consumers without their consent, and lured others in through nefarious clickbait, often presenting tabloids as news.
Fake News, Courtesy of the Chinese Communist Party
In June 2024, Reuters reported that NewsBreak often publishes fictitious, AI-generated stories that harm American communities. It also revealed the company’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Reuters found 40 articles on the app since 2021 which included plagiarism from local outlets, fake headlines, and made-up stories.
One false article included the headline: “Christmas Day Tragedy Strikes Bridgeton, New Jersey Amid Rising Gun Violence in Small Towns.” This prompted the Bridgeton Police Department to post on Facebook: “Nothing even similar to this story occurred on or around Christmas, or even in recent memory for the area they described.”
A Colorado food bank and a Pennsylvania charity had to send cease-and-desist letters to NewsBreak for publishing incorrect hours and fake community programs, prompting a flood of homeless for which the charities were unprepared.
In April 2024, a local news outlet, MyrtleBeachSC.com, analyzed 100 NewsBreak stories and found the app often republishes satire alongside legitimate news with no distinction between them.
Iris Tsouris was a disillusioned NewsBreak contributor in 2020 who observed that the app policed its homepage well but let tabloids slip through the cracks on the local tab. She alleged one such story trended on the Detroit crime section, entitled “51-Year-Old Man Blows Up Walmart Bathroom While Trying to Cook Crystal Meth.”
A Pattern of Infiltration
More importantly than overwhelming food banks and annoying police departments, NewsBreak’s position as the primary replacement of the hometown American newspaper provides the Chinese government the ability to sow internal discord in the U.S. and guide the worldview of millions of the most politically active American voters.
In 2015, the same year Zheng founded NewsBreak, Chinese President Xi Jinping identified “the control of data as a key to the nation’s ambitions.”
In 2015, China also established the Digital Silk Road (DSR) Initiative. It aims to export surveillance technology and digital infrastructure to developing countries. This allows the CCP to mine those countries’ data, either through forcing Chinese companies to turn that data over or by installing backdoors into Chinese technology.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) notes that China has aggressively focused on making its technology companies the global highways for data exchange to ensure that its commercial platforms dominate global markets. The Chinese government then allegedly harvests data from these tech companies to gain insight into societal trends in countries it wants to influence.
Chinese national intelligence laws specifically authorize the government to harvest data from Chinese companies like TikTok and e-commerce platforms Sheinf and Temu. A 2023 revision to its counter-espionage law requires all Chinese citizens to assist the government in counter-espionage activity.
In 2018, Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions found that 99 percent of firms that spend on research and development (R&D) receive government subsidies. This accounts for one-fifth of all R&D investment in China.
In 2019, the city of Hangzhou, a center of private enterprise in China’s Zhejiang province, announced that it was sending 100 government officials to work with the largest companies to improve communication between government and private enterprise. This followed a 2018 directive that required all companies operating in China with more than three Communist Party members to set up party committees.
Using the regional party apparatus to aid and surveil private technology firms matches the Stanford study’s findings that two-thirds of subsidy disbursements came from regional and municipal governments.
Artificial intelligence (AI) also plays a major role in China’s plans for global market domination and influence. Since 2014, China has implemented a military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy of eliminating barriers between technology developed and acquired by private companies and the Chinese military. In 2017, it created a Central Commission for Military-Civil Fusion Development.
Hong Kong University law professor Angela Huyue Zhang told to the MIT Technology Review that although China has recently fined some of its largest corporate giants for antitrust violations, it’s given private enterprise a free hand in AI development. She credits this with the government’s involvement as incubator, investor, research supplier, and customer of AI.
“Behind every successful Chinese AI firm, there is a local government,” she observed.
The attempt by Bytedance—TikTok’s parent company—to enter the U.S. news aggregator market provides an amateurish but cautionary tale on how the CCP seeks to infiltrate the American public square. Bytedance introduced its app TopBuzz the same year that Zheng introduced NewsBreak. TopBuzz peaked in 2018 but never gained widespread popularity, prompting ByteDance to shut it down in 2020.
It likely failed due to low-quality work and exaggerated clickbait. In 2018, it had to remove 2.7 million content pieces for violating its own community standards.
BuzzFeed spoke to over a dozen former TopBuzz employees who said the app promoted “soft” CCP propaganda. This included suppressing news critical of the Chinese government and promoting human interest stories of Western entrepreneurs touting the business-friendly environment in China.
The former employees claimed a content review system scanned for anything critical of the CCP alongside scanning for nudity and hate speech.
One Bytedance employee who worked at TopBuzz admitted on her LinkedIn page that she was “responsible for managing the content inside the platform according to Chinese government policies.”
“Let’s be real,” said another former employee, “this was not something you could say no to. If they don’t do it, somebody’s going to jail.”
Peking Pravda
The Reuters expose reported that the Chinese government praised NewsBreak’s parent company Yidian for its efficiency in spreading its propaganda. When Zhen founded NewsBreak, a CCP-affiliated news outlet called Phoenix New Media partly owned Yidian. The Phoenix New Media’s president Li Ya even became an early director at NewsBreak.
NewsBreak may have avoided TopBuzz’s fate by cutting ties with Yidian in 2019, allegedly because the parent company didn’t understand the U.S. market. Despite their separation, NewsBreak and Yidian continue to share a 2015 U.S. patent for an algorithm that recommends news content based on a user’s interests and location.
In February 2024, the Pentagon added one of NewsBreak’s largest investors, Beijing-based IDG Capital, to a list of dozens of companies that work with the Chinese military.
Despite Zheng’s insistence that NewsBreak is an American company, the R&D for the app remain in China along with half the company’s employees. Reuters found five advertisements on Chinese job sites seeking data analysts or engineers for NewsBreak’s offices in China capable of “in-depth mining” of “massive user behavior data from the app’s U.S. users.”
Just like allegations by former TopBuzz employees, tech writer Kim Kommando claims that NewsBreak stopped publishing her work when she started writing articles critical of apps with Chinese ties.
Cheating the Free Market Through Bloatware
NewsBreak’s 50 million monthly readers show that it has rapidly filled a market gap in local news that American companies slept on. However, it remains unknown how many users download the app intentionally and how many acquired it through bloatware.
Bloatware is software that carriers and manufacturers preinstall or add to phones with updates. Although it’s standard for companies to add their own branded apps to phones, they often make lucrative backroom deals with third-party vendors without customers’ knowledge. This allows them to undercut their competition by selling their phones at below market rate.
For instance, most Android devices that Verizon sells, particularly from Samsung, come with the Verizon App Manager (VAM) preinstalled. VAM allegedly helps organize apps but also installs them without customers’ permission. VAM comes bundled with DT Ignite—an uninstallable system app from the company Digital Turbine—which developers use to grow their apps through automatic downloads.
In addition to taking up space and draining battery, bloatware poses a potential national security risk when third-party apps come from foreign companies with tight relationships with their governments.
Chinese-made Android phones are notorious for their spyware in pre-installed apps. Unsurprisingly, CCP-owned TCL’s 10 5G UW from Verizon comes with NewsBreak pre-installed.
Samsung devices have also included NewsBreak in their bloatware since at least 2020. According to tech writer Sam Huang, the recently released Samsung Galaxy S 24 Ultra from AT&T is light on bloatware but includes NewsBreak among its 14 pre-installed third-party apps.
Many self-identified Verizon customers have complained online about VAM forcing unwanted apps on them during updates. In addition to NewsBreak, customers have identified Temu as another culprit. Within two years of its launch, Temu has already overtaken eBay as the world’s second most-visited e-commerce site.
“I can’t opt out. I can’t uninstall Temu either,” complained one customer.
“I feel like this app came out of nowhere and was able to afford tons of Super Bowl ads, now this,” remarked another. “Clearly they’re backed by a huge company.”
Indeed. The Chinese government is huge.
Another customer complained to Verizon in the company’s Community Forums about having NewsBreak installed every time they charged their phone. Gerson, the Verizon customer service representative, suggested they contact the app developer “for a second opinion on the issue” without offering them a first.
The Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies (IMDEA) conducted an analysis of nearly 70,000 pre-installed Android apps in 2019. It found that “a significant part of the pre-installed software exhibit potentially harmful or unwanted behavior.”
It concluded that agreements between third-party app vendors and phone vendors bundle custom permissions, leaving customers in the dark about what they’re agreeing to allow these pre-installed third-party apps to do. This includes user tracking activities that went beyond Android’s standard user tracking, such as “personal email and phone call metadata, contacts, and a variety of behavioral and usage statistics in some cases.”
“Nearly all apps which we identified as able to access [personal identifiable information], appear to disseminate it to third-party servers,” noted the study.
The myriad of actors involved in the development of pre-installed software and the supply chain … have privileged access to system resources through their presence in preinstalled apps but also as third-party libraries embedded in them. Potential partnerships and deals – made behind closed doors between stakeholders – may have made user data a commodity before users purchase their devices or decide to install software of their own.
It concluded:
Users are clueless about the various data-sharing relationships and partnerships that exist between companies that have a hand in deciding what comes pre-installed on their phones. Users’ activities, personal data, and habits may be constantly monitored by stakeholders that many users may have never heard of, let alone consented to collect their data [emphasis added].
It’s worth noting that companies with government backing—potentially all Chinese companies thanks to the country’s MCF strategy—have nearly unlimited resources to contract with cell phone manufacturers and carriers to include their apps in bloatware.
Ideological Bent
Online reviews show that despite NewsBreak’s dominating local news aggregation, both sides of the political spectrum dislike it. Some accuse the content of favoring liberal outlets and content creators; others complain of the comment sections being dominated by the Right and criticize the company for not censoring them more.
Nevertheless, from a content perspective NewsBreak decidedly leans left, according to Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) and AllSides.
MyrtleBeachSC.com found in its own analysis that the app’s most commonly sourced outlets are NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and The Hill. Using MBFC’s ratings of NewsBreak’s external sources, the website found that only 6 percent of stories that the app links to have a conservative bent.
Seattle-based conservative talk show host Jason Rantz alleges that NewsBreak gave him strikes for even mild criticism of institutional leftist narratives, prompting him to cease contributing to the platform.
This ideological bent isn’t surprising considering its leadership, which consists mostly of China-connected media professionals with backgrounds in left-leaning American companies.
Former HuffPost Operations Head, Chinese-born Vincent Wu, is the company’s chief operating officer.
Harry Shum, the company’s board chairman, formerly led Microsoft’s AI and Research Group and helped train many of China’s leading AI specialists at the Microsoft Research Asia lab, which he established.
Wynston Alberts is NewsBreak’s head of Trust and Safety (content moderation). Alberts previously founded YouTube’s Trust and Safety team in 2006, whose algorithms have aggressively discriminated against conservative voices because of the inherent liberal bias of its staff. He later led content moderation for TikTok in Japan and had a brief stint at Kuaishou, the leading competitor for China’s version of TikTok.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, chief advisor to NewsBreak, has donated almost exclusively to Democrats over the past 30 years. In the 2000s, he infamously authorized Yahoo China to turn over the IP addresses of dissident journalists to the Chinese government, which landed them in prison.
In 2021, at the behest of the leftist Anti-Defamation League, Yang founded the Asian American Foundation, which led much of the “Stop Asian Hate” campaign, a leftist knockoff of the Black Lives Matter movement meant to galvanize Americans of Asian descent to deassimilate.
In a podcast interview with former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Yang decried the political climate limiting Chinese investment in the U.S. Yet both correctly noted how few American companies succeed in China because that country favors its own. In the interview, Yang chillingly expressed interest in government cooperation with tech companies for political means, suggesting that the Arab Spring was a missed opportunity for public-private coordination toward a foreign policy end.
Divide and Conquer
While NewsBreak’s content leans left, a Restoration News review of comment sections for roughly 200 articles confirms that NewsBreak’s user base actually leans right.
The company tailors its ads to a demographic that votes mostly Republican: Females over 45 without college degrees, who live in suburban and rural areas. “I’m not sure whether this is good for the makers of News Break [sic] or not,” writes Henry Englert in The Business of Business, “but their app’s comment section is a Trump stronghold.”
The app’s target demographic tragically makes sense. College-educated Millennials with the means to care about local news tend to leave communities with shuttered newspapers and shuttered factories. The non-college-educated younger demographic suffers too much economically to read the news as voraciously as their older, more established neighbors.
NewsBreak’s target demographic presents two problems.
The app is using leftist “news” to target those who normally vote Republican. Rather than target upper-class elites who already agree with them like much of the mainstream media, NewsBreak is subtly trying to “correct” its readers’ conservative worldview with “reputable” sources.
Secondly, targeting those who have seen the small towns and nation they love destroyed by outsourcing, unrestricted immigration, and anti-American propaganda—which turned some of their children against them over politics—provides a rich environment for clickbait that paints the country as a crumbling dystopia. The comment sections frequently become a venting ground for many who feel they are losing their country. Hundreds of online NewsBreak reviews across multiple sites accuse the comments of being irrelevant to the articles, racist, hate-filled, sensational, and conspiracy-driven. Much of this owes undoubtedly to liberals’ inability to tolerate disagreement of any kind. But some comments raise questions about the legitimacy of the commenters—particularly those filled with typos uncommon to native English speakers. It is conceivable that many of the comments come from Chinese AI. NewsBreak’s inflamed comment sections aid Communist China’s chief foreign policy objective: Sowing discord and mistrust among Americans to weaken China’s adversary.
(De)Generative AI
In 2019, researchers at Beihang University in Beijing developed an algorithmic model called “DeepCom,” short for “deep commenter,” to jumpstart new comment sections.
The model comprehends an article and provides an AI-generated comment that accurately mimics a human comment. For its English language model, it pulled headlines, articles, and comments from Yahoo News. The researchers claimed that results from two datasets showed the model “can significantly outperform existing methods in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.”
The researchers admit that they “are aware that numerous uses of these techniques can pose ethical issues.”
In particular, we note that people expect comments on news to be made by people. Thus, there is a risk that people and organizations could use these techniques at scale to feign comments coming from people for purposes of political manipulation or persuasion . . . . While there are risks with this kind of AI research, we believe that developing and demonstrating such techniques is important for understanding valuable and potentially troubling applications of the technology.
In September 2023, Microsoft researchers discovered a months-long campaign by a network of fake, Chinese-controlled social media accounts—known as “sock puppet accounts”—which listed their locations in the U.S. and produced politically charged comments using generative AI. It mirrored similar activity discovered by the U.S. Department of Justice from China’s Ministry of Public Security.
In April 2024, another Microsoft report highlighted the increased use of Chinese sock puppet accounts posing as Americans to inflame passions on controversies such as climate change, border security, and race.
It also found that the CCP-linked group Storm-1376, also known as “Spamoflauge,” planted the idea on dozens of websites and social media platforms that the U.S. military started the wildfires in Maui while testing a “weather weapon.” Storm-1376-linked accounts also accused the U.S. government of causing a scandalous train derailment in Kentucky and linked it to other alleged cover-ups of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
In May 2024, OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, accused Storm-1376 of using its software to seek guidance for analyzing social media, presumably to catalog Americans’ social media trends and habits. It also accused the group of using its software to attack social media accounts critical of China.
This plays on America’s hyper-politicization of news and culture, when absolutely every issue quickly becomes politically charged and fact becomes difficult to separate from fake news. Distinguishing between real conservatives online and fake accounts becomes harder thanks to the one-sided indoctrination in America’s public schools as conservative teachers have been forced out or discouraged from working in education. The Left won’t train kids to question dogma, and they only learn caricatures of conservative views without ever hearing from actual conservatives.
For instance, ex-NewsBreak contributor Iris Tsouris unquestioningly considered the following incoherence to be a legitimate comment she saw on an election-related article, purportedly from a Trump supporter angry about votes counted after election day and mask mandates:
If I had known it was legal to vote for a president after day at I would have voted for my mom from my dad from granddad MMA granmammy on both sides my family and all my uncles and all my aunts that had passed away and I had a lot of Them. . . . the democrats just tried to steal the presidency from trump because they are bunch of day and control freaks that want to control us that’s why would still wear in the stupid mask and they are what is killing us [sic].
Sitejabber gives NewsBreak 1.5 stars out of 5 from over 70 reviews. Although a few reviewers suggest NewsBreak may be a Chinese psy-op, other unsuspecting reviewers share screenshots of hateful NewsBreak comments.
One reviewer shared a comment less than four months after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot from a two-month-old account named “Joe Zudic.” Zudic—whose location was listed as a town in Canada—fantasized in broken English of taking Congressmen from the White House and hanging them upside down in front of the Lincoln Memorial before shooting them by firing squad.
In addition to clownish race baiting, other comments decried immigrants for not being vaccinated—a suspicious ideological discrepancy.
Not every article has such extreme comments. Our analysis of NewsBreak comment sections for over 200 local articles from the Nashville, Tennessee area found most of them unremarkable, albeit with a clear conservative lean.
One “April K,” allegedly from Clarksville, Tennessee, did display bot-like activity, such as commenting far more than other accounts, aggressively promoting conspiracy theories, seeking to sow distrust in both major political parties and the U.S. government, and advocating for extremism that tottered between conservatism and anarchy. April K.’s English lacked punctuation and was often so incoherent that it drew the attention of other commenters.
In response to an article on North Carolina’s flooding damage from Hurricane Helene, April K. commented: “Massive lane [land] grab there stealing north Carolina for lithium batteries so they can have slaves digging for that shit they get patent for hurricanes and tornadoes. Look it up……….. Are we finally pissed sheeple[?]”
Under 21 different articles, including one entirely unrelated to Hurricane Helene or the affected areas, April K. posted the same message in broken English: Someone—presumably the government—has patents on hurricanes and tornadoes and is using Hurricane Helene to steal North Carolinians’ land to make lithium batteries. The list continues:
- In reply to an article on Trump vowing not to cut entitlements for seniors, she wrote: “The puppets lie so much don’t listen to his lies.”
- In a reply to a comment on New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ indictment in September 2024, April K. replied, “They all are both sides same bird different wings all puppets.”
- Replying to an article on the Dominican Republican deporting Haitians, she wrote, “Yay our cats and dogs are gonna be safe soon.” Considering that Clarksville is decidedly not in the Dominican Republic, it seems the comment was likely triggered by a headline with the words “deport” and “Haitians” in it.
- In response to an article about a theater coming to Clarksville and another about Nashville debating how to provide better transportation for the disabled and veterans, April K. bizarrely claimed that people need better food and water first—a comment seemingly triggered in response to frivolous government spending in a developing country.
- Regarding the recent dockworkers’ strike, she suggested they were striking because they were tired of hearing children scream from the containers.
- In response to an article entitled “What Products Could Be Affected by the Port Strike?” April K. wrote: “Selling children would be first.”
- On another, she replied: “Well how are we gonna eat when the port strike.”
- April apparently mistook “shoot” for “shit” in a debate on whether those shooting at Israelis were also shooting at American forces and vessels in the Red Sea, replying with: “We get shit on like always.”
- On articles about cyclists getting hit by cars, April K. repeatedly complained of there being no sidewalks when she obviously meant bike lanes.
- Under another article, she accused Beyonce and her husband of killing people for fame.
- In response to an article on a woman advocating for gun licensing, April K. responded: “Not taking my gun away if that becomes true then it will be another holocaust.”
There is no way to tell for sure if April K. is a deranged person with bad grammar or an AI-generated bot. The advances in generative AI and China’s foreign policy motivations, however, necessitate a conversation on the ability of narrative introduction through sock puppet accounts.
This Cannot Continue
It’s little wonder, then, that one reviewer calls NewsBreak “proof that local journalism is dead.”
The death of local news created a market that only a deep-pocketed motivated investor could fill. Allowing a Chinese company to meet that demand gifts the CCP potential access to influence tens of millions of American voters through biased content curation and generative AI in comments. Competitors from the U.S. and American-allied countries can’t compete because they lack the advertising funds available to CCP-subsidized companies.
Even Democratic politicians, normally weak on China, are concerned. Reuters’ expose on NewsBreak prompted Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), along with Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to call for congressional oversight of NewsBreak. However, even if the U.S. government banned NewsBreak another Chinese app would soon replace it. Warner called for a more holistic approach to the Chinese threat, arguing, “We simply cannot win the game of whack-a-mole with individual companies.”
The disadvantage of Chinese tech companies lies in their unfamiliarity with American consumers and the companies’ tendency to place profit over accuracy. TopBuzz provided an example of poor execution in AI-based clickbait and attempted divisiveness.
Although NewsBreak cut ties early with its explicitly CCP-allied parent company, it shares the same founder and algorithm patent, and its R&D remains in China. This opens it up to government coercion to carry out CCP foreign policy directives regardless of Zheng’s willingness to do his government’s bidding.
As analysts at Microsoft and the DoD have found, the Chinese government and allied actors have a pattern of creating sock-puppet accounts powered by AI to undemand trust among Americans in their government and each other. Although their efforts have so far proven ineffective, the CCP’s investment in perfecting AI and Chinese companies’ growing market dominance in every app category through traditional marketing and backroom deals with phone manufacturers and carriers poses the threat of future viewpoint dominance in the U.S.
Ultimately, there are no easy solutions to limit Chinese influence in the news and influencer markets in the U.S. short of government intervention similar to what China does to keep foreign influence out of its country. China allows foreign companies to do business there but always ensures it keeps enough pressure on the scales to allow Chinese companies to outcompete them. A good place to start would be to regulate bloatware to ensure that Americans do not automatically receive Chinese apps. If Americans want to use Chinese apps, they should at least have to make a conscious decision to download them.
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Jacob Grandstaff is a contributor at Restoration News.
Photo “Newsbreak App” by Newsbreak.
