Twitter first identified the Chinese state-backed disinformation campaign in August, when it removed accounts it said were seeking to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Photo: anushree fadnavis/ReutersHONG KONG—A Chinese government-linked effort to spread pro-Beijing messages through Western social media is clumsy but persistent, allowing it to adapt and improve over time, according to a new analysis of mostly Chinese-language activity on Twitter and Facebook.
Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute came to that conclusion after examining more than 20,000 users that formed the core of a network of roughly 174,000 accounts that Twitter on Thursday identified as carrying out a Chinese state-backed campaign to spread propaganda.
Twitter said Thursday the accounts had been deleted. ASPI’s analysis, published Friday, indicates that new and repurposed accounts have already emerged on Twitter and Facebook to disseminate the same kind of messaging that seeks to spin current events, such as the civil unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody, to Beijing’s advantage.
China’s Twitter efforts are “nowhere near as sophisticated” as Russia’s campaign to influence U.S. elections in 2016 and more akin to “blunt force campaigns where they try to kind of overwhelm the topic with a lot of spam,” said Elise Thomas, a researcher at ASPI.
However, they are “astoundingly persistent” in the face of multiple takedowns going back to September 2019, she added. “It’s something to watch because they might get better.”
In response to Twitter’s shutdown of state-backed accounts, China’s foreign ministry on Friday said that those who ought to be shut down are accounts that organize to smear China.
“China is the largest victim of false information,” said spokeswoman Hua Chunying at a daily press briefing in Beijing.
China’s government has ramped up efforts to spread its views on some of the world’s most popular social-messaging platforms, most of which are blocked in China. In recent months, Chinese diplomats and officials have taken to Twitter to defend China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and attack Washington—in one case, even endorsing a fringe theory that the virus originated in the U.S.
The officials have been supported by an army of anonymous accounts that helps to spread and amplify their messages. Chinese state media have also sought to support the campaign by buying up advertisements on U.S. social-media sites.
Twitter first identified the Chinese state-backed disinformation campaign in August, when it removed nearly 1,000 accounts it said were seeking to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Twitter tipped off Facebook, which scrubbed accounts, pages, and groups linked to the same operation.
Both Twitter and Facebook have since announced that they would stop running ads by state-controlled media.
Beijing’s efforts to sow disinformation appear to prioritize speed and scale over quality, ASPI noted in its report, which also examined dozens of Facebook accounts that shared identical or highly similar content to those on Twitter and behaved suspiciously—such as by abruptly pivoting to posting in Chinese.
Most of the posts released by Twitter, which targeted the Chinese diaspora, generated little traction, the report said, with nearly 80% of accounts having zero followers. A large number also contained errors. One post criticizing U.S. legislation to protect human rights in Hong Kong warned in English that the move would “escalate violence” in the city. Others directed at Hong Kong audiences used characters in ways that would appear unnatural to the city’s largely Cantonese-speaking population.
Many of the accounts also suddenly started posting about China after previously posting about other topics, sometimes in other languages—an indication they had been repurposed. In March, one Twitter user, previously a Francophone, tweeted “Test123” in Chinese before jumping into attacks on Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire and outspoken government critic.
China’s Twitter campaign has had some success in dominating searches for certain hashtags by using what appeared to be a third-party commercial bot network to boost its posts, said ASPI. The bot network, which also promoted topics ranging from diet regimes to cryptocurrencies, allowed recently created accounts with almost no followers achieve “implausibly high” levels of engagement such as likes. On May 13, 2020, the birthday of Hong Kong’s unpopular pro-Beijing chief executive, state-backed accounts were part of the top tweets associated with the “Hong Kong” hashtag in Chinese.
Despite the multiple waves of culling by Twitter, campaign operators appear to have been able to spin up new or repurposed accounts to fill the void—sometimes in a matter of days, said ASPI researchers. Even with Twitter’s most recent purge of suspect accounts, carried out over the first three months of the year, new social-media posts exhibiting similar behavior have already emerged to pick up the slack.
In June, as protests against police brutality and racism continued across the U.S., fresh social-media posts that appeared linked to China’s state-backed campaign turned their focus to criticizing what they called the U.S’s “double standard” of human rights—a line often repeated by China’s Foreign Ministry.
Others appeared to warn Hong Kongers against seeking support from unreliable American allies. “Put down the unrealistic fantasy quickly, cut off the ties with the US side,” tweeted one account. “Think twice before you make a mistake.”
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