Why Facebook and Twitter cracked down on Chinese state attacks on Hong Kong protesters
- Social media giants are reluctant to police content extensively but are under growing pressure to shut down state actors and fake accounts
- Posts comparing anti-government demonstrators to ‘cockroaches’ did not violate hate speech rules but fell foul of ban on ‘coordinated’ misinformation
Twitter and Facebook’s recent crackdown on accounts targeting the Hong Kong protest movement highlights the difficulty social media giants have in trying to uphold their commitment to free speech in the face of a coordinated, state-backed political disinformation campaign.
While some of the posts used inflammatory language – for instance describing the protesters as “cockroaches” – the two companies did not ban them for violating their polices on hate speech but for breaching their guidelines on “coordinated” activity.
Twitter said it had banned 936 accounts linked to the Chinese government for violations like spamming and “coordinated activity”, while Facebook said it had removed five accounts, seven pages, and three groups for state-linked “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
YouTube’s parent company Google also announced it had disabled 210 channels on Friday for “coordinated influence operations” related to the protests, though it did not explicitly say that state interference had been at work.
Social media companies have been under intense pressure to shut down the state actors and suss out fake accounts, but analysts said the use of extreme language in politically motivated posts is a grey area given their reticence about policing political speech.