  The spread of misinformation, conspiracy, and questionable content and
information manipulation by foreign adversaries on social media has surged
along with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such malicious cyber-enabled actions may
cause increasing social polarization, health crises, and property loss. In this
paper, using fine-tuned contextualized embedding trained on Reddit, we tackle
the detection of the propaganda of such user accounts and their targeted issues
on Twitter during March 2020 when the COVID-19 epidemic became recognized as a
pandemic. Our result shows that the pro-China group appeared to be tweeting 35
to 115 times more than the neutral group. At the same time, neutral groups were
tweeting more positive-attitude content and voicing alarm for the COVID-19
situation. The pro-China group was also using more call-for-action words on
political issues not necessarily China-related.
