A State Department report viewed by Business Insider warns that China, Iran, and Russia are using the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to spread anti-US messaging.

The disinformation campaigns are similar and include language that the coronavirus is an American bioweapon.

Though China tightly controls the internet within its own country, it has reportedly allowed the foreign propaganda to flourish.

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China, Iran, and Russia are each using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to spread disinformation related to the United States, according to a State Department report viewed by Business Insider.

The messaging from each government aligns with the others, the report says.

They include the baseless narratives that the coronavirus is an American bioweapon and is being spread by US troops, that the US is scoring political points from the crisis, and that all three governments — unlike the US — are managing the crisis well, according to the document.

The report, which is produced by the department's Global Engagement Center, is not public.

The propaganda from each country is matching up with the others

The report makes the case that propaganda from the three governments have converged as coronavirus has spread.

Some of the information is produced by state-run media, and some has been put out by the governments, the report says.

A website run by Russia's Defense Ministry highlights the conspiracy theory that billionaire Bill Gates played a role in creating the virus, for example.

Chinese President Xi Jinping inspects the novel coronavirus prevention and control work at Anhuali Community in Beijing, China, February 10, 2020. Xinhua via REUTERS

There was some overlap between the three governments messaging before the pandemic, but it was largely limited to the defense of President Nicolas Maduro's government in Venezuela, according to the GEC.

In February, though, as the virus started to spread outside of China, the messaging began to converge. A core message shared between them is that China is a strong global health leader and the United States is a weak ally. The pandemic began in China as far back as November. China reportedly allows Russian propaganda within its own highly controlled internet network Lea Gabrielle, who helms the GEC, told Politico that China has also let Russian propaganda efforts targeting the US spread, while the Beijing government's internet censorship is notoriously relentless. "What we saw as the health crisis started to come under control in China is that the CCP really started pushing a concerted effort to try to reshape that narrative," she told Politico, using the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party. "So in a short period of time the CCP went from letting Russian disinformation claiming the U.S. was the source of the virus proliferate in Chinese social media, to raising questions on state media about the origin's source, to promoting disinformation that the U.S. was the source of the virus." Firefighters disinfect a square against the new coronavirus, in western Tehran, Iran, Friday, March 13, 2020. Associated Press/Vahid Salemi The Chinese government's messaging is both defensive and offensive, she told Politico, which also received a copy of the document. "At the same time, we saw Beijing unleashing a steady drumbeat of pro-PRC content across its global media networks and also from its overseas missions and that included increasingly vocal criticism of how democratic countries were responding to the crisis," she said. In response to a comment request by Politico, a Chinese Embassy spokesperson referred to previous interviews the Chinese ambassador to the US did. In one, with Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, the ambassador said that United States is trying to take "political advantage of other people's sufferings." A spokesperson for Iran's mission to the United Nations told Politico the U.S. is responsible for any propaganda or disinformation about the pandemic, not Iran.