Twitter removes 170 thousand Chinese accounts in the fight against propaganda

Twitter has removed over 170 thousand accounts from its platform after the discovery of influential campaigns from China, broadcast news.net.

The company announced that 23,750 main accounts have been removed. 150,000 accounts designed to increase content from core accounts were also removed.

These accounts had no “as much to have any number of followers and were strategically designed to artificially vent impressions and include with core accounts”.

78.5% of the accounts included in the Twitter data set have no followers at all.

Some accounts were legal, old users whose profiles may have been hacked or purchased as part of the campaign. Twitter says the Chinese accounts mostly promoted favourable stories for the Chinese government, and the unfavourable ones for Hong Kong protests.

The accounts also focused on domestic protests taking place in the US. After George Floyd's death.

The goal is to create <x0-second moral challenge” between the two countries, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which works on Twitter to carry out this study.

This would be through a demonstration of “hispocrisicism for its criticism of police response to the protests in Hong Kong, while US police and troops themselves resort to violence against US protests, and warns Hong Kong protesters not to think they can rely on the US for support against China's” national interests.

Taiwan and the Corleone pandemic were also part of the main messages from accounts, writes Independent, broadcast news.net. China has been criticised for not allowing Taiwan to become its state, while US support for separatists increases.

The research highlighted a number of tactics by the Chinese government for “efforts to form the information environment in its advantage”, including:

• Co-ordination of diplomatic and state media messages.
• Using Western social networking platforms to disinfect in international media coverage.
• The immediate reflection and rejection of Western media coverage by Chinese state media.
• The possibility of co-accession of media plotting to target vulnerable networks to manipulations.
• Using unauthentic coordinated networks and undeclared political advertising to actively manipulate the audience of social networks.