Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is Director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies, and Yeta Purnama is a researcher at the same independent research institution based in Indonesia

“Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” or FIMI, describes how governments spread coordinated messages abroad to shape belief. The term rightly moved us past “fake news.” But it carries a blind spot: it assumes that a local voice echoing Russian or Chinese talking points must be secretly controlled by Moscow or Beijing. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t. FIMI is good at spotting the moment a message crosses a border. It is weak at explaining what happens once that message lands among domestic politicians, media outlets, business interests and audiences, which is exactly where a foreign narrative stops being foreign.

At least four things can be happening when a local actor repeats a foreign-aligned narrative, and they carry very different weight. Someone may genuinely believe it, after their own reading of events. A politician may find it domestically useful, attacking a rival or rallying a base, regardless of who benefits abroad. A media outlet or influencer may simply be chasing the attention and revenue a conspiratorial narrative reliably generates. Or, least common but most consequential, a foreign government may be directly funding, instructing or organising the content. Treating all four as equivalent, as much FIMI analysis does, flattens “I agree with this” and “I am paid to say this” into a single accusation: foreign agent.

That fourth category is real, and when it happens it can usually be proven with hard evidence rather than inferred from resemblance. In September 2024, a US Justice Department indictment alleged that two RT employees funnelled almost $10 million through shell companies to Tenet Media, an outlet whose roster included commentators Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, directing content that served the Kremlin’s interest in deepening US divisions. The commentators say they were deceived. Whatever the truth of that defence, the case rests on wire transfers and internal communications, not on how pro-Russian the content sounded.

Contrast that with the Philippines’ long-running fight over who counts as “pro-China.” Former president Rodrigo Duterte’s conciliatory turn, downplaying a 2016 tribunal ruling and courting Chinese investment in its place, is generally read by analysts as a bet on economic and political payoff for a domestic coalition of officials and businesses, not as evidence Duterte took orders from Beijing. A separate, traceable thread runs alongside it: Chinese state outlets pushed a claim that a Philippine civil-society flotilla was secretly a Western-funded psyop called Project Myoushu. Filipino bloggers who had received sponsored trips to China and were regularly cited by its state media then adapted that claim into accusations against named local civil-society figures, pushing it further through networks of coordinated, inauthentic Facebook accounts.

Line up the actors and the mechanism becomes visible. A media outlet, Chinese state broadcasters, originates a narrative; a politician, Duterte and his allies, adopts a related but distinct position for domestic economic reasons; business interests keep conciliatory rhetoric alive regardless of who said it first; a sponsored influencer adapts the narrative to a local grievance and hands it to anonymous networks to amplify. Only the last role shows an actual foreign hand still on the wheel.

There is a further stage worth naming: the point where a narrative needs no foreign fingerprint at all to keep circulating. By the 2025 Philippine midterm elections, “pro-China” had become a stock domestic insult. One congressman accused a colleague of “siding with China” on the House floor; President Marcos built part of his campaign around attacking Duterte’s China-friendly record, with no reference to what Beijing actually wanted. That is naturalisation: the argument is no longer really about China, only borrowing it as a symbol.

International IDEA’s research on elections finds foreign campaigns work best when local people already agree with the message. Its companion report argues foreign interference is rarely the root cause of democratic decline, more fuel on an existing fire. That should reorient the inquiry. “Who is spreading Beijing’s message?” is the easy, satisfying question, because it produces a villain. The harder, more useful one is: why did this message find an audience here, now? A corruption scandal, an economic downturn, a fragmented media environment, these explain resonance better than any foreign capital does, and blaming Moscow or Beijing lets everyone else off the hook.

None of this makes ordinary citizens passive vessels. Real audiences interpret information through their own experience, reject what clashes with existing belief, and remix foreign narratives with local grievances into something new, a Russian talking point can become a local weapon the Kremlin never controls.

None of this makes foreign manipulation harmless. The evidence for organised campaigns, like Tenet Media’s, is real. But treating every aligned local voice as a suspect damages democracy rather than protecting it, and it gives genuinely coordinated operations cover to hide among false accusations.

The real test, then, isn’t whether a narrative traces back to Moscow or Beijing, almost any can, in the thin sense that state media said it first. What matters is whether anyone can trace forward: to a wire transfer, a sponsored trip, a coordinated account network. Where that trail exists, “foreign interference” is earned, and should be pursued fully. Where it runs out, what remains is ordinary politics, a leader chasing investment, an outlet chasing an audience, a citizen chasing an argument that already fits. Confusing the two doesn’t just produce bad research. It teaches a public to treat disagreement as suspicion, and hands real operations the one thing they need most: an environment where every accusation sounds the same, and none can be trusted.

The opinions expressed are those of the contributors, not necessarily of the RSAA.