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Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts that it says have been linked to Chinese government efforts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and democracy protests in Hong Kong. “In general, this entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “They were Tweeting …
Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts that it says have been linked to Chinese government efforts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and democracy protests in Hong Kong.
“In general, this entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “They were Tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China (CCP), while continuing to push deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong.”
Twitter found 23,750 “highly engaged” accounts and roughly 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that were designed to boost these posts, even though most of them had few followers and low engagement on their tweets, the company said.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement has played a role in rising tensions between the US and China. The Trump administration recently moved to end Hong Kong’s special status after Beijing approved new national security restrictions for the territory.
Twitter said it traced the accounts to China using “technical links” similar to those associated with another network of 936 Chinese accounts that targeted Hong Kong protesters last year.
The San Francisco-based company also removed more than 7,300 accounts linked to Turkey that showed strong support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has also been accused of cracking down on dissenters. Another 1,152 accounts were taken down because Twitter tied them to a Russian state-backed political propaganda outlet, the company said.
Twitter announced the crackdown about two weeks after it placed fact-checking notices on President Trump’s tweets, which led the president to target social media companies with an executive order. Twitter also flagged a Chinese government spokesman’s factually dubious tweets about the coronavirus.
