China has been using pornography spam accounts on Twitter to spread discord and disinformation regarding the Hong Kong protests, according to researchers from the International Cyber Policy Center.
Operatives backed by the Chinese government may have been running covert disinformation campaigns on Western social media platforms for at least two years, according to researchers from the International Cyber Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who released a report on Tuesday.
Recently, a lot of the disinformation regarding the Hong Kong protests involved a wide range of activity on Twitter, which included spam accounts focused on anything from soccer, to Korean boy bands, to even pornography.
“This was a blunt-force influence operation, using spam accounts to disseminate messaging, leveraging an influence-for-hire network,” say the researchers in the report, adding that the main language used was Chinese, suggesting that the target audience were people from Hong Kong, as well as their Chinese supporters living overseas.
“This was the quintessential authoritarian approach to influence,” note the researchers, “one-way floods of messaging, primarily at Hong Kongers.”
The report added that this particular disinformation campaign linked to the Chinese government had been “clumsily re-purposed and reactive,” noting that the communist regime typically has the luxury of framing “freedom of expression on China’s domestic internet” by using “top-down technocratic control,” among other state-managed methods.
“Researchers have suggested that Chinese government efforts to shape sentiment on the domestic internet go beyond these approaches,” reads the report. “One study estimated that the Chinese government pays for as many as 448 million inauthentic social media posts and comments a year.”
“The aim is to distract the population from social mobilization and collective forms of protest action,” the report adds. “This approach to manipulating China’s domestic internet appears to be much less effective on Western social media platforms that are not bounded by state control.”
According to one of the researchers, Elise Thomas, the state-backed Twitter campaign was particularly detectable due to its lack of sophistication.
“It’s the one that got caught. Maybe there are much better campaigns out there,” said Thomas, according to a report by Quartz. “Or it could be [that it’s the] first time they are dipping their toes into operating a western social media platform. That’s why it’s so clumsy.”
It was also mentioned that many of the deceptive accounts were “re-purposed spam accounts,” and had been “readily and cheaply available for purchase from resellers, often for a few dollars or less.”
“You scratch the surface and you see something is not right,” said Thomas. “For example, if someone who clicks on one of those former porn bots tweeting about Hong Kong protests just scrolls down a bit, they would have seen a huge number of tweets about porn, which would have made them a little bit more suspicious.”
A few weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter announced that they were removing “inauthentic” accounts discovered to be operated from within the Chinese government.
The social media platforms said that fake “state-backed” accounts had been “deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground.”
Among those accounts banned, reportedly included the pornography Twitter accounts seeking to “sew discord and disinformation” among Hong Kong protesters.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.
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