Fake Twitter Accounts Found Spreading Chinese Propaganda: Report

A US-based intelligence firm says it uncovered a community of greater than 600 inauthentic Twitter accounts that unfold a optimistic narrative of China’s far-western Xinjiang area, as Beijing was being accused of human rights abuses and locking up a whole lot of 1000’s of Uyghurs and different ethnic minorities there.

According to a report launched Monday by Nisos, 648 Twitter accounts posted a number of thousand tweets with hashtags similar to #xinjiang, #forcedlabor and #humanrights, with seemingly innocuous content material similar to conventional dancing and scenic photographs, in addition to movies with people denying that pressured labour exists in Xinjiang.

The community and its tweets look like supposed to advertise “a positive narrative regarding Xinjiang and Uyghur treatment within the People’s Republic of China” and actively focused a overseas viewers, the report discovered.

The report comes as China is being criticized internationally for its therapy of Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group native to the Xinjiang area. In latest years, China held a whole lot of 1000’s of Uyghurs in what Beijing calls “vocational education and training centres” however are extensively believed by consultants and teachers to be internment camps.

China has additionally been accused of utilizing pressured labour in packages that transferred Uyghurs out of Xinjiang and assigned them to completely different factories across the nation. Global manufacturers internationally together with Nike and H&M expressed concern over the usage of pressured labour, confirming that they won’t use merchandise similar to cotton from the area and can strengthen oversight of their provide chains.

While Nisos researchers didn’t reveal who’s behind the community of inauthentic accounts, they mentioned nearly all of tweets had been posted throughout enterprise hours in China, between 9am and 7pm Many of the accounts had been created after August 2021, utilizing inventory photos for his or her profile photos, and the tweets had been usually posted inside minutes of one another.

The accounts would usually quote different accounts throughout the community to achieve visibility on the platform, though at instances they might additionally amplify content material from Chinese diplomats, similar to Zhang Meifang, the consul normal of China in Belfast, in addition to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, Nisos mentioned.

Many of the Twitter accounts talked about within the Nisos report have since been suspended for violating Twitter guidelines.

This shouldn’t be the primary time that researchers have uncovered networks of inauthentic accounts posting propaganda to affect perceptions of China.

Last yr, researchers on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute discovered that greater than 2,000 Twitter accounts had been pushing narratives by China’s authorities on what was taking place in Xinjiang, lots of which expressed anti-Western sentiment or labelled the accusations in opposition to China as lies.

China usually makes use of social media as a method to unfold its messages, with an investigation final yr by AP and the Oxford Internet Institute discovering that armies of faux accounts amplify propaganda by Chinese diplomats and state media tens of 1000’s of instances to achieve a wider viewers whereas masking the truth that the content material is state-sponsored.

Earlier this yr, China launched a discreet social media marketing campaign through which it paid a US-based company to recruit influencers within the US with the purpose of selling the Beijing Winter Olympics on social media platforms Instagram and TikTok.