Twitter has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that were part of a mainland Chinese campaign to influence opinion on the protests in Hong Kong. Twitter said on Monday that it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that it believes were part of a Chinese government influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.
The company also said it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.
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Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticised for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organisations.
The accounts were suspended for violating the social networking platform’s terms of service and “because we think this is not how people can come to Twitter to get informed”.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election through social media.
After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said on Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.
Facebook does not release the data on such state-backed influence operations. The company also does not ban ads from state-owned media companies.
“We continue to look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re also taking a closer look at ads that have been raised to us to determine if they violate our policies.”
Twitter traced the Hong Kong campaign to two fake Chinese and English Twitter accounts that pretended to be news organisations based in Hong Kong. Though Twitter is banned on the mainland, it is available in Hong Kong.
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The Chinese language account, @HKpoliticalnew, and the English account, @ctcc507, pushed tweets depicting protesters as violent criminals in a campaign aimed at influencing public opinion around the world. One of those accounts was tied to a suspended Facebook account that went by the same moniker: HKpoliticalnew.
An additional 936 core accounts Twitter believes originated from within China attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong by undermining the protest movement’s legitimacy and political positions.
About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network. Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.
The Twitter official said the investigation remains ongoing and there could be further disclosures.