Twitter Is Trying To Control Propaganda

Twitter says it has removed tens of thousands of "state linked" accounts used by China, Russia and Turkey to push their own propaganda, sow misinformation and attack critics.

To date, more than 170,000 accounts tied to an operation to spread pro-China messages have ben shut down.

The accounts were removed after the social network found that they had attempted to influence perceptions of events including the US protests over the death of George Floyd, the virus pandemic and protests in Hong Kong. 

The company said a core network of 23,750 highly active accounts had been deleted, along with another 150,000 amplifier accounts. Twitter also revealed it has shut down more than a thousand Russia-based misinformation accounts.

The firm said the Chinese network, which was based in the People's Republic of China (PRC), had links to an earlier state-backed operation it broke up alongside Facebook and YouTube last year. That operation had been pushing out messages about the political situation in Hong Kong.  "While this network is new, the technical links we used to identify the activity and attribute it to the PRC remain consistent with activity we initially identified and disclosed in August 2019," Twitter said in its company blog, which was also tweeted by the firm's founder Jack Dorsey.

• In Russia, a series of social media accounts identified by Stanford as the “Current Policy” group, a pro-Kremlin anti-opposition, and anti-Western entity, created 1,152 Twitter accounts that tweeted 3,434,792 times. 

• In Turkey, 7,340 accounts were found to have tweeted 36,948,524 times. Twitter attributes the operation to the “youth wing of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)”. The operation, for the most part, “targeted Turkish citizens”, according to Stanford Internet Observatory.

Twitter also said it had discovered a network of accounts linked to a media website it found to be "engaging in state-backed political propaganda within Russia". This network of accounts, totaling 1,152, has now been suspended. "Activities included promoting the United Russia party and attacking political dissidents," Twitter's blog added.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a Canberra based think-tank, analysed the dataset ahead of the announcement and said the network was primarily looking to sway views within the global Chinese diaspora.

Combating Fake News

Twitter has also accused US President Donald Trump of making false claims in some of his posts, although the platform has come under fire for not removing coronavirus misinformation.  The company said it was trialing a new "read before you retweet" pop-up aimed to promote "informed discussion". The message will appear on articles that users share that they haven't yet opened on the site. 

While Twitter is targeting accounts thought to be controlled by authoritarian regimes, online video-conferencing company Zoom has temporarily closed down many accounts of people openly critical of China. The California-based company was engulfed in a free speech row after prominent US and Hong Kong activists found their accounts suspended in the run-up to the anniversary events marking Beijing's crushing of the pro-democracy uprising in 1989.

Twitter, along with YouTube, Google and Facebook, is banned in China, which uses a "Great Firewall" to scrub its Internet and censor negative information.

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