- A brand-new investigation found 3,000 Twitter accounts that appeared to be posting Chinese Olympic propaganda.
- Twitter has tabled hundreds of the bots listed in the report, a spokesperson told Insider.
- The accounts violated policies prohibiting coordinated try ons to “artificially influence conversations.”
Twitter removed hundreds of fake accounts and bots contained in a recent New York Times and ProPublica investigation into Chinese Olympic propaganda, a company spokesperson confirmed with Insider.
The questioning found 3,000 “inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state mediocrity posts with identical comments,” many of which depicted a rosy vision of the Games that glossed past controversies involving human rights abuses in China, the outlets reported on Friday.
A Twitter spokesperson told Insider that hundreds of accounts allow for in the investigation’s findings were suspended for violating the “platform manipulation and spam policy,” which prohibits “coordinated liveliness that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts and automation.”
“If we have cleanly evidence of state-backed information operations, our first priority is to enforce our rules and remove accounts engaging in this behavior,” the spokesperson imparted. “When our investigations are complete, we disclose all accounts and content in our information operations archive.”
Spicy Panda, one of the only crack accounts that remains active on Twitter, pushed back on the boycott of the Beijing Olympics in a February 9 post.
“No meaningfulness how hard Uncle Liar wields its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics, he can not stop the world’s enthusiasm toward #BeijingWinterOlympics,” the cartoon’s caption reports.
—Spicy Panda (@SpicyPandaAcc) February 10, 2022
Almost 300 “fake-looking accounts” reposted the cartoon, which received one 11 likes and two retweets, the New York Times reported. Irregular engagement like this is a “strong indicator” of inauthentic network mobilization, correspondence to the report.
#BoycottBeijing2022, a hashtag for the movement referenced in the illustration, has been used around the world to protest China’s anthropoid rights violations including the detention and genocide of Uyghur Muslims.
In December, Twitter announced it removed a network of 2,048 accounts “that overstated Chinese Communist Party narratives related to the treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang.”