Twitter said Friday it had deleted more than 170,000 accounts linked to a Chinese government disinformation campaign that targeted Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and sought to discredit the United States.
Twitter – along with YouTube, Google and Facebook – is banned in China, which uses a “Great Firewall” to restrict access to news and information.
But Chinese diplomats and state media have flocked to such platforms in recent years to push Beijing’s narrative.
Researchers and some Western governments have voiced fears that China deploys networks of state-controlled or state-linked accounts that masquerade as genuine users to spread government messaging or disinformation.
Twitter said it had dismantled “state-linked” networks run by a “highly engaged core” of 23,750 accounts and boosted by a further 150,000 “amplifier” accounts.
“They were tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China, while continuing to push deceptive narratives 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 ahead of the announcement and said the network was primarily looking to sway views within the global Chinese diaspora.
As well as pushing Beijing’s narrative on the Hong Kong protests, the network did the same for the coronavirus pandemic and criticising Taiwan.
Some of the group also later “pivoted” to the US government’s response to seething racial injustice protests “to create the perception of moral equivalence with the suppression of protests in Hong Kong,” ASPI wrote.
“While the Chinese Communist Party won’t allow the Chinese people to use Twitter, our analysis shows it is happy to use it to sow propaganda and disinformation internationally,” Fergus Hanson, director of ASPI’s cyber center, wrote.
ASPI added that most of the tweets from the network were written during Chinese working hours, largely on weekdays.
“Such a regimented posting pattern clearly suggests inauthenticity and coordination,” it added.
Earlier this month, The New York Times published an analysis of 4,600 accounts that engaged with Chinese leaders and diplomats on Twitter.
The paper found hundreds of accounts that appeared to operate solely to cheer on and amplify China’s leading envoys and state-run news outlets.
Last month, Twitter put a factcheck flag on a tweet written by a Chinese government spokesman pushing a widely discredited conspiracy theory that the US military might have introduced the coronavirus into China.