The Yan Report is a misleading article masquerad

The Yan Report is a misleading article masquerading as science,which falsely claims that the novel coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. Anexample of cloaked science, itwas released during a time of intense uncertainty; as scientists raced foranswers about COVID-19, sharing unvetted data as preprints in open sciencerepositories became an essential mode of international collaboration. Theincreasing openness of the scientific community, though, is a vulnerabilitythat can be leveraged by media manipulators, especially during times of crisis.On April 28, 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong(HKU), fled to the United States with support from Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui.They used Yan’s story — that she was a whistleblower — to exploit thecontentious wedgeissue of the unknown origin of COVID-19.
Thismedia manipulation campaign involved planting misleading evidence into thescientific literature, muddying the waters aboutCOVID-19 and providing the veneer of scientific legitimacy for the political claimthat coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon. Subsequently, the Yan Report wasamplified through right-wing media networks, leading to nearly a million viewsof the report on Zenodo, an open-access research data repository.While social media platforms moderated information about the Yan Report afterscientists at several universities debunked it,two follow-up Yan Reports were uploaded to open science repositories that evenmore bluntly pushed the bioweapon narrative, while also refuting the academicresponses to the first report. Seeding the Yan reports in the scientificcommunity as cloaked science allowed those who linked to them on social mediato claim legitimacy, while also providing the empirical basis for furtheringthe political aims of the funders of the reports.

Stage 1: Manipulation Campaign Planning andOrigins
Withina few weeks of the novel coronavirus spreading from China to the rest of theworld, a pernicious narrative began to take root online: the suggestion thatthe virus SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon created in a lab.
Inmid-January 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong(HKU), gave credence to this idea when she told her favorite YouTuber — WangDinggang, a vocal critic of the Chinese government, and close associate ofexiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui — about rumors she had heard aboutthe virus’ origins. Wang repeated the conversations on his channel withoutnaming her “because officials could make the person disappear. ”
OnJanuary 25, 2020, a hyperpartisan news outlet called G News publishedan article further pushing the bioweapon conspiracy theory. It was titled,“Breaking news: China will admit coronavirus coming from its P4 lab.” G News was not the only media outlet pushingthe narrative, but its involvement was significant because G News is a media outlet associatedwith Guo and Steve Bannon, former Breitbart executiveand ally of President Trump. The two have formed a partisan allianceto push their shared anti-CCP agenda through the Rule of Law Foundation and theRule of Law Society, which they founded in October 2017. Funded by Guo andmanaged by Bannon, Rule of Law aims to “protect and assist individualsvictimized in China, particularly those penalized for speaking out againstinjustice.” Guo and Bannon were drawn together because both “naturallydespise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” according to Guo.They also both have media backgrounds. Bannon was previously Trump's chiefstrategist, and, before that he ran the right-wing news site Breitbart. Guo founded and funds G Media,whichoften posts anti-CCP stories across social media platforms, and prominently onthe social media platform, Parler.
Priorto the first Yan report being released, Bannon said Wang’s YouTube episodefeaturing Yan was shown to and translated for him. As doubts about theorigins of COVID-19 continued to proliferate across right-wing media networks,Guo and Bannon connected with Yan. This is when the pieces fell into place forwhat would become the Yan Report media manipulation campaign.
Ininterviews, Yan had been arguing that both China and the World HealthOrganization knew about the novel coronavirus earlier than they admitted. Thisis not a unique claim. Similar narratives, for example, were also circulatingusing the hashtag #chinaliedpeopledied, which went viral in March and April2020. Yan put forward that she had evidence that the notion that the virustransferred from animals to humans was a “smokescreen” to hide its true origin,which she claims is a lab in Wuhan with close connections to the Chinese CommunistParty. These claims are unfounded and have been debunked.
Whilesimilar claims had been made by others, Yan stands out due to her background inscience. Her CV says she has a medical degree from Xiangya Medical College ofCentral South University and a PhD from Southern Medical University. Priorto joining Bannon and Guo, Yan held a postdoctoral fellowship at Hong KongUniversity (HKU), where she was the first author on a COVID research paper thatwas published by Nature —one of the most prestigious biology journals in the world.
Guoflew Yan to the US on April 28, 2020. In her most recent articles, shelists the Rule of Law Foundation and the Rule of Law Society as her formalaffiliations.
Inlate April and early May, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeofanned the flames of the January rumor that COVID-19 was made in a lab. Trumpcontradicted his own intelligence team by saying he had seen evidence and thathe had a “high degree of confidence” that it was created and released in Wuhan.
OnJuly 10, 2020, Yan traded her story upthe chain from online and hyperpartisan newsoutlets to an interview on Fox News. Duringthe interview she said she was in hiding from the Chinese government andreferred to herself as a whistleblower, claiming to have worked onhuman-to-human COVID transmission as early as December 2019. Fox, in turn, called her a whistleblowerin its article about the interview. It is the earliest article labelingher as such.
Theinterview garnered a lot of attention online with over 2.7 million views onYouTube and 18K reactions on Facebook. The YouTube video has since beenremoved by Facebook according to data from CrowdTangle, a “public insightstool” owned by Facebook. The day after this interview, HKU put out a pressrelease refuting what Yan told Fox News abouther research.
Yancontinued to ramp up media appearances. On September 9, she repeated her claimsto Raheem Kassam, co-host of Bannon’s popular podcast and YouTube show War Room: Pandemic, editor-in-chief of theconservative news site NationalPulse and former editor-in-chief of BreitbartLondon. On September 11, Yan told LooseWomen, a British talk show, that she would publish the evidence. Theinterview is available on YouTube, and has over 1.4M views. Then the New York Post quoted Yan’sinterview with Loose Women, as did Tech Times (8.8K followers on Twitter),  the Daily Mail (2.6M followers), and Mint(1.9M followers).  
WithYan, Guo and Bannon were able to effectively exploit the active crisis ofthe coronavirus by spreading her claims about its origins and the wedge issue of mistrustof the CCP. However, reporters were still skeptical of her claims and commentsacross social media repeatedly clamored for evidence.

STAGE 2: Seeding Campaign Across SocialPlatforms and Web
Allof this publicity put Yan’s name into circulation in the US and primed thepublic for the next phase of the campaign, which was the release of a preprintscientific paper. The paper exploited the vulnerability of open science tofurther muddythe waters about the origin of COVID-19 and push ananti-CCP narrative. The paper is an example of cloaked science — a discretepiece of scientific-looking misinformation — which gave credibility toconspiracies suggesting that COVID-19 was a bioweapon and that it had beenengineered by China.
OnSeptember 14, 2020, Yan, along with three other names,32 released a preprintpaper on an open-access research data repository called Zenodo. The title ofthe paper used scientific keywords central to the bioweapon misinformationnarrative: “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting SophisticatedLaboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of ItsProbable Synthetic Route.”33 Its entire claim isin its title: COVID-19 was created in a lab. She joined Twitter and tweeted theZenodo link to her preprint.
Onceconsidered controversial, the publication of preprints during the pandemic hasincreased in order to share data quickly during the crisis. But preprintpublications can also be a vulnerability in the information ecosystem. Becausepreprints are not scrutinized in the same way as peer-reviewed journal articlesand can be uploaded by anyone, they can become vectors for misinformation.“Preprints are the Facebook of science,” said Dr. Pamela Silver, who sits onthe advisory board of bioRxiv, the premier preprint server for biology.
Yan’schoices to release the paper as a preprint, and to use Zenodo as the terrain todisseminate it, appear strategic. Zenodo is hosted at the European Organizationfor Nuclear Research (CERN) and funded by OpenAIRE and the European Commission.Uploads to Zenodo are automatically assigned a DOI (Document Object Indicator),which gives it a baseline-level of legitimacy and a way for other scientists tocite it. Additionally, in contrast to bioRxiv, Zenodo is designed so thatanyone with an email address can upload their ideas.
BioRxivalso has a four-to-five day delay between author upload and public viewing,whereas Zenodo makes papers available immediately. If Yan had uploaded to bioRxiv,she would have had to wait while the team reviewed the uploaded preprint todetermine whether the information was original and scientifically sound. Furthermore,on bioRxiv, authors need to be affiliated with an institution with an ORCID (anacademic identifier), but Zenodo does not have the same requirement. Yan listedher affiliation on her Zenodo paper as Bannon and Guo’s Rule of Law Foundationand Rule of Law Society.
OnceYan had uploaded the preprint to Zenodo, it wassharedby others across multiple platforms. Raheem Kassam uploaded it to Scribd as“The Yan Report,” emphasizing her authorship. Using the same namingconvention, it has been uploaded to YouTube as audio and added to publiclyviewable Google Drives. Tweets and articles also describe the preprint as the“Yan Report.”
Thespeed of open science meant that Yan’s preprint could travel far — and quickly.Onthe day of its publication, Twitter mentions of Yan’s report were made by thelikes of India’s WION News (292.5Kfollowers) and News18 (4.5Mfollowers); right-wing accounts such as ZeroHedge (842Kfollowers); and retired NBCUniversal Senior Executive Mike Sington (24.2Kfollowers).
PeterNavarro (92.5K followers), Assistant to the President and Director of theOffice of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, tweeted, “It would be unbelievable ifit weren't so believable. #CCPLiedPeopleDied.” The tweet included a link to a ZeroHedge article about Yan joiningTwitter and tweeting a link to her paper. It received 12.7K retweets and 19.1Klikes.The Yan Report also sparked conversation in online forums, such as Reddit.
Accordingto a capture by the Internet Archive, Yan’s preprint had 156,769 views and104,708 downloads on the day it was uploaded to Zenodo, making it instantly oneof the most popular papers about COVID-19.
In aninterview with National Geographic, Dr.Angela Rasumussen, a virologist at Columbia University, explained that Yan’spaper “looks legitimate because they use a lot of technical jargon. But inreality, a lot of what they're saying doesn't really make any sense.” Yan’spaper includes graphs, datasets, and cellular models, making it look like she hasthe evidence to back up her claims.
STAGE 3: Responses by Industry, Activists,Politicians, and Journalists
OnSeptember 15, the day after publication, Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. On the segment, shediscussed her report. It was the fourth-most-watched program on TV that night,with an estimated 4.85 million viewers tuned in.G News releaseda statement about Yan’s paper that included a direct link to the paper.
Carlsonposted the clip of Yan’s appearance to Facebook and tweeted it. On Facebook, ithas 73K reactions, 16K comments, and 78K shares. On Twitter, the clip has56K likes and 27K retweets. The interview, also uploaded to YouTube, hasaround 2.8M views. The link was promoted by Carlson’s colleagues, such asTammy Bruce, whose preview of the episode attracted 21.6K Twitter likes.
Forcomparison, other Fox storiesthat day received much less attention. The top two results of a Facebook searchshow 1K and 2.3K engagements, respectively.
Onthe day of the Carlson interview, Yan uploaded her publication to ResearchGate. Having thepreprint on other repositories increases the likelihood that someone searchingonline would find the paper, and redundancy acts as a backup in case it isremoved from one site. By September 16, the views on her Zenodo paper hadreached 404,163, per the Internet Archive.
Bannonwent on Tucker Carlson’s show two days after Yan, where he discussed Yan andher paper. He interviewed Yan on War Room:Pandemic 11 times between July 28 and October 2, 2020. Bannonand Kassam continue to host her and Navarro, a major booster of her report,periodically. She appeared on the show a total of 22 times in 2020, accordingto a count of the show notes on Pandemic:War Room’s website.
Conservativenews sites covered the Yan Report uncritically, such as National Review, as well asthe same media outlets that reported on Yan before her Zenodo upload: Fox, New York Post, and Tech Times. It also received international media exposure viareporting by Australia’s New.Com.Au, Spain’s AS English,and India’s WION.
Influentialconservatives voices continued to amplify the Yan Report on social media.Interview clips, commentary, and links were shared as Facebook posts, tweets,and retweets by Senator Marsha Blackburn, Rev. Franklin Graham, and PresidentTrump, signifying a degree of political adoption,at least by some members of the president’s party. By arguing that COVID-19 wasdesigned in a Chinese lab, the Yan Report affirms Trump’s repeated claim that“it’s China’s fault.”
Ananalysis by TaSC found that links to the preprint have been tweeted andretweeted 15,731 times. Just three tweets (two from Yan and one from Navarro)received two-thirds of the retweets.
Thegraph (shown below) charts the virality of the Yan preprint. Yan’s preprintreceived about 850,000 views between its upload and October 8, the date sheuploaded her next report. This graph is based on data captured by the InternetArchive. To put the Yan Report’s virality in context, it is important to notethat other papers uploaded around this time have only a few hundred views.
As ofFebruary 10, 2021, the Yan Report had 1,043,337 views and 735,879 downloads.


STAGE 4: Mitigation efforts
Themedia attention that the Yan Report received led academic scientists to issuerefutations of the preprint, and that analysis was then covered by critical press.There is scientific and journalistic consensus that the content of Yan’spreprint is not convincing, and furthermore, is medical misinformation.
Aweek after its upload to Zenodo, the preprint was fact-checked by JohnsHopkins’ Center for Health Security, which said that the paper “offerscontradictory and inaccurate information that does not support their argument.” Anotherproblem with the paper is that it cites “multiple papers in their referencesection that have weaknesses or flaws to make their case.”
In aninterview with CNN, Nancy D.Connell of Johns Hopkins, explained why her team decided to engage with thepaper: “It was clear on social media that the paper was getting more and moreattention. We talked carefully and thought for a long time whether to do it.”
OnSeptember 24, MIT scientists concluded,“This manuscript does not demonstratesufficient scientific evidence to support its claims. Claims are at timesbaseless and are not supported by the data and methods used. Decision-makersshould consider the author's claims in this study misleading.” The Yan Reportwas also fact-checked by scientists at Columbia University, Carnegie MellonUniversity, and the University of Washington.
Inaddition to critical press and debunking, Twitter suspended Yan’sTwitter account two days after she created it to share the preprint, thoughTwitter made no public statement about the cause of the suspension. Twitteralso de-indexed the longformversion of the link to her preprint, so that no results appear when it issearched on Twitter. Shorter versions of the link, however, still lead totweets about the preprint.
Facebook and Instagram addedwarnings to Tucker Carlson’s posts about his interview with Yan. YouTube videos— from Tucker Carlson, Fox News,and Loose Women — all have a small banneracross the bottom with an option to view CDC information.

Socialmedia moderation, however, did not quell the interest in the paper. Afterattempts by the platforms to reduce the report’s spread, Infowars posted an article sayingthat Facebook had “censored” the Tucker Carlson interview. Sara Carter, a Fox commentator, also broughtattention to content moderation and urged her followers to watch the interviewclip. The New York Times also reported on social media responses.
Yanhas claimed that censorship kept her work at the preprint stage, thoughwe have found no evidence that Yan and her named co-authors sought publicationin any scientific journal, as customary with a preprint like this. Instead,these claims of censorship echo media manipulation strategies that makeunfounded claims about bias in order to create an aura of illicit information.
In aninterview with Zenodo’s curators and representatives from OpenAire, the teamtold TaSC they weighed removing the preprint from the repository. They decidedagainst it because it would be antithetical to the spirit of their platform —and their terms of service. They state that an upload isn’t an endorsement.Rather, they maintain Zenodo is a platform where scientific conversation canbegin. Keeping the Yan Report online, they said, means that it can be discussedand debunked. When scientists fact-check it, they have a paper to reference anda DOI to cite. However, the site currently does not provide a discussion forumor labels that identify when there is significant refutation of content ontheir site.
STAGE 5: Adjustments by campaign operators
Yanpublished a second paper on October 8, however, with some tactical adjustment,specifically in the language ofthe title and the content of the paper. The title of this second paper is morestraightforward, and less scientific-sounding: “SARS-CoV-2 Is an UnrestrictedBioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, OrganizedScientific Fraud.” This title covers top keyword search terms fordisinformation about bioweapons, which topped the most shared stories thisyear. Per The New York Times, “mediaintelligence platform” Zignal Labs found that content about bioweaponsaccounted for 24.2 percent of the misinformation spread in 2020.86
Thissecond paper was uploaded to Zenodo, but unlike the first one, was not acceptedto the site’s Coronavirus Disease Research Community - COVID-19. The second YanReport was also uploaded to ResearchGate, and it is part of the site’sCoronavirus Community.
Aspart of her tactical adjustment, Yan created a second Twitter account in orderto tweet her second preprint. During the observation period, it received 16.3Klikes and 14.1K retweets and quote tweets. It was immediately shared byright-wing Twitter accounts, such as ZeroHedge,which posted the link along with a mention of how quickly Yan’s account wasremoved after her last paper.
Anticipatingmore platform moderation, Yan also tweeted a link to her Gab account(should her second Twitter account be removed), which represents furtheradjustment. Gab is a minor platform frequented by white supremacists,conspiracists, and others who seek unmoderated online discussion forums. As ofFebruary 10, 2021, Yan’s latest Twitter account was still active and has nearly76K followers. Her second paper has 229,918 views on Zenodo and has beendownloaded 117,651 times.
Notably,for the second Yan Report, CNN accusedYan of copying passages from an anonymous blogger into her preprint. Thisresulted in a third working paper, which is a direct response to CNN. Also uploaded to Zenodo, it is titled“CNN Used Lies and Misinformation toMuddle the Water on the Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The paperattempts to refute CNN’splagiarism claims and contends that CNN usedits media power to discredit Yan’s work and reputation. Uploaded on November21, 2020, this paper has received only 30,080 views and 9,403 downloads. Unlikethe previous reports that included misleading science, this upload appears tobe a press release, wherein Zenodo is acting as part of the distributioninfrastructure for Yan’s public replies.
Conclusion
Byexploiting open science during a health crisis to further their political aims,Bannon and Guo utilized Yan’s status as a research scientist fleeing Hong Kongto sustain public attention to the “COVID-19 as a bioweapon” narrative. Whiledata repositories and preprint servers have provided crucial infrastructure forinternational collaboration on COVID-19, like other online platforms, they canalso be used in disinformation campaigns, due to the legitimacy they confer byassociation. When lay publics and some journalists view these sites, they mayinadvertently assume the content has been vetted or assessed in some officialcapacity, and is therefore sound science. Cloaked science can be particularlydeceiving when it is surrounded by research from top tier scientists,universities, and institutes.