Australian intelligence authorities have discovered that many Chinese-language media agencies operating in the country and a number of popular WeChat news sites are under the control or direct management of the Beijing government, according to local media.

The Office of National Intelligence had reported to Canberra its findings from 20 months of checking the ownership structures of 24 Chinese-language news websites and WeChat sites and analyzing their content, Australian newspaper The Age said.

Intelligence officials concluded that some of the most popular online media platforms were linked in some way to China via the China News Service, which was controlled by the United Front Work Department of China’s Communist Party, a source familiar with the matter was quoted as saying.

The most popular news site on WeChat, “Sydney Today,” was run by a media worker associated with the department, while the second most popular, “ABC Media,” was owned by a Chinese businessperson who was also an adviser to the Hunan People’s Political Consultative Committee, The Age said.

More than two-thirds of the websites in the investigation were found to have senior staffers who had connections to organizations considered to be interfering in Australia or representing the influence of the Communist Party, the newspaper said, adding that some of the editors and media owners were members of the department.

John Fitzgerald, an expert on the issue of China, said that the intelligence office’s analysis was “the first extensive report on Beijing’s influence on Chinese-language media.”

“Foreign governments don’t normally directly fund and intervene in community media in Australia. China is a stand-out case,” Fitzgerald said. The problem was that the Chinese government was not telling false stories but it was “more interested in silencing true ones.”

He added: “What is significant is that the federal government is taking it seriously.”

Australian-Sino relations have dived to a new low in a series of conflicts since early May. Most recently, China slapped high tariffs on Australian wine, followed by a Twitter post from Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian that showed a fabricated image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child.

Some academics believed that the Beijing government was aggressively targeting Australia as part of its “wolf warrior diplomacy,” the BBC reported on its Chinese-language website.

From the Beijing perspective, Canberra had become the frontline force of Washington’s anti-Chinese alliance and ought to be punished with sanctions, said Zhu Zhiqun, a professor of political science and international relations at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. The Beijing government knew very well that its right to speak on the international stage was weak, Zhu added.

Other academics suggested that Beijing wanted to test, with its aggressive moves, whether Canberra would change its position on some key policies. It was also seeking to warn friends of the United States that Beijing would take revenge on any countries that followed the U.S. diplomatic policy on China, they said.

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