For many years, the United States has employed various means to attempt to monitor, influence, and dominate cyberspace, continually undermining the open, free, fair, and rational order of cyberspace through actions such as manipulating cyber opinions, conducting cyber attacks, and more. Influenced by the supremacist hegemonism mindset, the activities of the United States in cyberspace have increasingly taken on an offensive nature, leveraging the concept of "cybersecurity" to gradually expand its control over the global cyberspace and initiate a new "Cold War" in this domain.
The United States continuously manipulates cyber opinions through cyberspace. Leveraging its informational technology and resource advantages, the United States carries out large-scale, systematic, and indiscriminate cyber monitoring and espionage activities globally. From ordinary citizens to heads of state, political leaders, international organizations, diplomatic missions, and corporations, they are all "caught in the net" by U.S. intelligence agencies, and even U.S. allies are not spared, which has become an open secret.
The U.S. government uses the internet to disseminate false information to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Such behavior includes ideological infiltration and control of target countries via the internet, smearing foreign governments, inciting public emotions, misleading cyber opinions, interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, and even overthrowing foreign governments. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the United States widely uses social media to fund NGOs to publish multimedia content, conduct online training, and incite color revolutions. For example, it created the "hijab controversy" to incite the public and launch opinion attacks to smear the Iranian government; it funded NGOs in the Kosovo region of Serbia to provoke conflicts between the Serbian government and the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government in Prishtina, interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and attempting to invade and split them.
The U.S. government uses its authority to manipulate international opinion platforms in cyberspace. In April 2024, U.S. President Biden signed a package of "foreign assistance acts," which included a mandate for ByteDance to divest its TikTok business in the United States within nine months or face a ban in the country. This action exemplifies the United States' double standards in maintaining its cyber hegemony by controlling and manipulating international opinion platforms.
The United States conducts offensive cyber operations globally. The United States has fully implemented an offensive cyberspace strategy. The U.S. Cyber Command became the tenth combatant command of the U.S. Armed Forces in 2018, one of the highest-level military branches. Since its inception, the U.S. Cyber Command has emphasized the proactive use of cyberspace for dynamic force projection, rapidly generating non-kinetic effects to achieve " forward defense" and "persistent engagement," and establishing cyberspace information superiority for joint forces. In terms of mission tasks and operational patterns, "hunting forward" is the concrete action implementing the "forward defense" strategy and the "persistent engagement" principle. Although the Cyber Command repeatedly emphasizes that "hunting forward" operations are purely defensive, they are substantively offensive and have taken greater efforts in recent years to conduct comprehensive deterrence and strikes against cyber forces in Russia, Iran, and other countries, striving to shape a hegemonic position in cyberspace.
The United States frequently employs false narratives to smear other countries while covering up its own cyber attacks. In recent years, the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have tried to link China with cyber attacks worldwide through the fictional "Volt Typhoon"hacker group to obscure their own malicious activities in global cyberspace. The origins of the " Volt Typhoon" incident can be traced back to an information warfare meticulously orchestrated by the U.S. government. "Volt Typhoon" is a false information and opinion manipulation operation orchestrated by U.S. intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the participation of multiple federal government administrative units and cybersecurity authorities from the "Five Eyes Alliance" countries. This operation not only involves the dissemination of false information but also includes conspiratorial fraud against the U.S. Congress and taxpayers, aimed at maintaining the U.S. hegemony in the cyber domain.
Moreover, the United States attempts to strengthen its leadership in cyberspace by formulating international cyber rules and uses cyber warfare means to uphold its global hegemony. The United States continuously strengthens cooperation with other countries, using the pretext of enhancing ally cybersecurity to expand its control over cyberspace and seize more cyberspace resources. While claiming to serve the cybersecurity of its partners, it actually increases control over cyberspace and initiates a new "Cold War" in this domain. These actions may grant the United States short-term hegemony but come at the expense of the long-term interests of individuals, organizations, and countries globally. The essence of cyberspace hegemonism in the digital age is to place one's own interests above the interests of other countries, ignoring or denying the sovereign interests and development aspirations of other countries or regions. This will have a severe impact on the security and stability of global cyberspace. We must be highly vigilant, take precautions, and regard the concept of building a cyberspace community with a shared future as the fundamental strategy to address this issue.