Twitter and Facebook have suspended various accounts that they say are tied to a Chinese misinformation campaign against pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Twitter said Monday it
suspended 936 accounts probably associated with the
activity. The corporate said the misinformation campaign was
designed to “sow political discord in Hong Kong, as well as undermining
the legitimacy and political protest movement on the bottom.”
Over the weekend, about 1.7
million anti-government protesters gathered in Hong Kong to rally peacefully against the Chinese government
that assumed rule of the
previous British colony in 1997. Protests erupted in June following a now-suspended
bill that will permit criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be extradited
to mainland China.
“Based on our intensive
investigations, we’ve got reliable proof to support that this is a coordinated
state-backed operation,” the
corporate said in a blog post. “Specifically, we’ve identified giant clusters of accounts
behaving in a coordinated
manner to amplify messages associated
with the Hong Kong protests.”
Following Twitter’s announcement, Facebook said in a blog post
that it was working on a tip from
Twitter. Both corporations face raised pressure to restrict on fake accounts and false content
on their platforms within the aftermath
of the 2016 presidential election, throughout which foreign actors used the
sites to sow division around social problems.
Twitter’s latest move comes after social media website Pinboard warned days
earlier that China was using Twitter
to distribute posts from state media discrediting the protests.
Twitter is blocked in China; however many of the accounts it discovered were using virtual non-public networks, that encrypt and anonymize internet traffic. The accounts it
suspended represent the “most active” portion of the broader spam
campaign that it estimates to
incorporate about 200,000 accounts.
As a results of the announcement, Twitter said it’d no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news media entities.