China and Russia driving autocratic shift around world, report says
Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers who used artificial intelligence to drill into the activities. The U.S.-based nonprofit Action for Democracy said in a report Wednesday that its researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.It found that China and Russia "sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration” and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report’s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, "surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.”
