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.…
Read the full storyNewsBreak, Americans’ Most Downloaded News App, Poses Likely Chinese Communist Threat
