The United States is the true “empire of lies”, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Saturday, lashing out at a U.S. State Department report that accused Beijing of ploughing billions of dollars annually into information manipulation efforts.

China is manipulating global media through censorship, data harvesting and covert purchases of foreign news outlets, the U.S. State Department said in the report on Thursday.

Despite the unprecedented resources devoted to the campaign, Beijing had hit “major setbacks” when targeting democratic countries, due to local media and civil society push-back, according to the report, which was produced under a congressional mandate to detail state information manipulation.

The report has disregarded facts, and is itself false information, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement.