All accounts and their content have been deleted from Twitter.
Hong Kong, China:
On Friday, Twitter said it had deleted tens of thousands of “state-linked” accounts used by China, Russia and Turkey to push their own propaganda, sow misinformation or attack critics.
The largest network discovered was by far linked to China, said the American social media giant, made up of a “very committed core” of 23,750 accounts which was boosted by 150,000 other “boosting” accounts.
The Turkish network consisted of 7,340 accounts while the Russian group employed 1,152 people.
All accounts and their content have been removed from Twitter but have been placed in an archive database for researchers.
Twitter said the Chinese network was detected using systems it used to delete state-linked accounts last August, at the height of the huge and often violent democratic protests in Hong Kong.
The current network has “failed to gain considerable traction” but “is involved in a series of manipulation and coordination activities”.
“They mainly tweeted in Chinese languages and spread geopolitical stories favorable to the Chinese Communist Party, while continuing to mislead stories about the political dynamics in Hong Kong,” Twitter wrote in its analysis.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – a Canberra-based think tank – analyzed the dataset before the announcement and said the network was primarily aimed at influencing views within the global Chinese diaspora.
In addition to pushing Beijing’s account of the Hong Kong protests, the network did the same for the coronavirus pandemic and criticizes Taiwan.
Part of the group also later “pivoted” the US government response to protests of boiling racial injustice “in order to create a perception of moral equivalence with the suppression of the protests in Hong Kong,” wrote ASPI.
“Although the Chinese Communist Party does not allow the Chinese people to use Twitter, our analysis shows that it is happy to use it to spread propaganda and misinformation internationally,” wrote Fergus Hanson, director. of the ASPI cyber center.
Twitter – as well as YouTube, Google and Facebook – is banned in China, which uses a “big firewall” to clean up its Internet and censor negative information.
In recent years, Beijing has pushed to be much more visible on these companies with state-owned media and ambassadors adopting platforms that ordinary Chinese citizens cannot access.
In its analysis, Twitter said that the Turkish network had been detected in early 2020 and was mainly aimed at strengthening internal support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling party.
Russian accounts have been implicated in “cross-publishing and amplifying content in an unauthentic and coordinated manner for political ends”, including the promotion of a ruling Russia and the attack on political dissidents.
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
