Twitter removes 170,000 Chinese accounts in fight against propaganda campaign

The accounts tweeted about the coronavirus pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the Hong Kong protests.

Twitter has removed over 170,000 accounts from its platform following the discovery of influence campaigns from China.

The company announced that 23,750 core accounts were removed.

150,000 accounts designed to boost the content from the core accounts were also removed.

These accounts had “little to no follower counts either and were strategically designed to artificially inflate impression metrics and engage with the core accounts.”

78.5% of the accounts involved in Twitter’s takedown dataset had no followers at all.

However, some accounts were legitimate, older users whose profiles may have been hacked or purchased as part of the campaign.

Twitter says the accounts were tweeting predominantly in Chinese to promote narratives favourable to the Chinese government, and unfavourable ones about the Hong Kong protests.

The accounts also focused on the domestic protests happening in the US following the death of George Floyd.

The intention is to create “moral equivalence” between the two countries, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which works with Twitter to conduct this research.

This would be through demonstrating “hypocrisy for its criticism of the response by police to protests in Hong Kong, while the US’s own police and troops use violence against protests in the US, and warns Hong Kong protesters not to think they can rely on the US for support against China’s national interests”

Taiwan and the coronavirus pandemic were also part of core messages from the accounts.

China has been criticised for not allowing Taiwan to become its own state, while US support for the separatists grows.

The Australian researchers said that this pivot to Western platforms is relatively new. Twitter, like Facebook and other major social media sites, is currently banned in China.

“We should expect continued evolution and improvement, given the enormous resourcing the Chinese party‑state can bring to bear in aligning state messaging across its diplomacy, state media and covert influence operations.” the ASPI wrote.

The research pointed out a number of tactics from the Chinese government to "attempt to shape the information environment to its advantage,” including:

• The coordination of diplomatic and state media messaging
• The use of Western social media platforms to seed disinformation into international media coverage
• The immediate mirroring and rebuttal of Western media coverage by Chinese state media
• The co‑option of fringe conspiracy media to target networks vulnerable to manipulation
• The use of coordinated inauthentic networks and undeclared political ads to actively manipulate social media audiences

Additional reporting by Reuters