Twitter removes 23,750 China-linked accounts for spreading disinformation
- The accounts, most of which had no followers, were ‘spreading geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party of China’, Twitter said
- One in three tweets were about Hong Kong, while others were about dissident Guo Wengui, the US civil unrest and Covid-19, according to an analysis
The US social media platform on Friday said 1,152 Russian-linked accounts and at least 7,340 Turkish government-linked accounts were also removed. These accounts spread deceptive or political narratives favourable to the incumbent governments.
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“This entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities,” the company said in a press release on the recent removal.
“They were tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party of China while continuing to push deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong,” it said.
The suspended China-backed accounts were part of a larger network of some 150,000 spam accounts, which were caught early and removed before they gained traction on Twitter, according to the social media firm.
Twitter and other technology companies such as Facebook are increasingly scrutinised for their management of online public platforms that could be misused for state-backed disinformation campaigns or spread speech that incite hate and violence.
China has become a top source of disinformation campaigns on Twitter as the number of state-linked accounts removed far outnumber those of other countries. At the same time, the country’s state media and diplomats have opened accounts and post rhetoric and narratives supporting the Chinese Communist Party.
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Twitter’s analysis on the accounts and their content was carried out by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Stanford Internet Observatory. This archive of state-linked information operations is the only one of its kind provided by any technology company, according to Twitter.
Dr Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, said the influence campaign run by the state-linked accounts in China showed persistence and growing sophistication. The centre’s research revealed the campaign started in April 2017.
An analysis of the 23,750 removed accounts found that 78.5 per cent had no followers and 95 per cent had fewer than eight followers. They have sent out almost 350,000 tweets.
“It’s targeting audiences in Hong Kong and the broader Chinese diaspora,” Wallis said in a phone interview. “We can see linguistic traits that much of the content was created by Mandarin speakers who were trying to translate into Cantonese.”
The posting pattern of the tweets revealed a production cycle that fit neatly to the timezone in China and showed activity during the working hours of the week – patterns that would not be found in a random sample of normal Twitter accounts, according to Wallis.
“These were all coordinated and behaviour driven at scale,” he said.
“They’re entrepreneurial in terms of their capacity to adapt to current events,” Wallis said.
However, the campaign, which has been running in various forms since 2017, has not managed to drive organic engagement on Twitter. This just shows the persistence of the state actor, according to Wallis.
“The operation is not succeeding in driving significant organic engagement. That persistence is really interesting because it tells us what we are dealing with is an actor who is determined to manipulate social media audiences at scale,” he said.
