Sep 20, 2019 06:00:00

What is the strategy that Chinese authorities are deploying on Twitter to conclude the Hong Kong demonstration?

By

PPPSDavid

Twitter was officially announced in August 2019, behind the ongoing demonstration activity in Hong Kong, 'Chinese authorities were making a big leap on Twitter to cast distrust in the Hong Kong demonstration.' The New York Times explains the Twitter strategy of the Chinese authorities.

How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong's Protesters-The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/18/world/asia/hk-twitter.html

The New York Times focused on the Twitter account '@HKpoliticalnew'. Since this account was opened in June 2018, it has been reporting in English various sports news, such as sports news such as tennis and soccer, and the results of the ' ugly dog contest in the world '.

The following image is the image of @ HKpoliticalnew's tweets from the New York Times around June 2018, with yellow circles representing English tweets and red circles representing Chinese tweets. An example of @ HKpoliticalnew's tweet is shown in the right frame, and an English post “ Andy Murray defeats Wimbledon and turns to support a British player as a countryman” is shown. At that time, there were overwhelmingly more English tweets than Chinese tweets.

However, suddenly @HKpoliticalnew transformed into an account that reports Hong Kong and mainland news in Chinese. In the image diagram, red circles occupy the majority, and it can be seen at a glance that Chinese tweets have increased dramatically.

In 2019, he wrote a tweet saying, 'Hong Kong's independence has fallen into a dead end, but there are always people fighting and throwing themselves in the flames. A circle with different sizes appears in the image diagram, but the size of the circle indicates the number of retweets.

Around the summer of 2019, the number of retweets of @ HKpoliticalnew's tweets suddenly increased. One of the tweets says, 'The United States has invested in Hong Kong Independence and is brainwashing penniless children. #Spy is everywhere. #Color

Revolution #Hong Kong.'

Twitter has officially announced that it is “Chinese government work” for 200,000 accounts engaged in propaganda activities like @HKpoliticalnew. Deleted 1000 accounts including @HKpoliticalnew and suspended the remaining accounts.

Twitter and Facebook announce that the Chinese government is operating information on the SNS about the Hong Kong demonstration-GIGAZINE

The New York Times explains that the Chinese authorities used the method of “buying a Twitter account” for the Hong Kong demonstration. Many of the accounts believed to be involved in Chinese government work were tweeting in languages other than English and Chinese around 2016. However, the number of English tweets has increased dramatically from 2017 to 2018. He has tweeted about propaganda in Chinese since mid-2017. It seems that these Twitter accounts tended to promote dating services and retweet tweets and pop punk music about Korean boy bands before propaganda spread.

An example of this is a Chinese tweet posted by the account @derrickmcnabbx that says, “I really miss Hong Kong as a Hong Kong lover who loves Hong Kong before being developed and ruled by

law ”. It is displayed that this tweet was posted in Georgia, the United States on June 15, 2019, but it seems that tweets before 2019 were only links to pornographic sites. This suggests that the Chinese authorities had purchased an account from a professional merchant and used it for propaganda strategies. Also, the New York Times says that there are accounts that were hijacked by account hacks instead of purchased accounts.

By

BrianAJackson

The vast majority of propaganda tweets were posted during the weekday day, including accounts that regularly tweet at 12 and 42 minutes per hour. The New York Times wrote, “Evidence that operatives working on time are posting tweets.”

A report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute , one of Australia's think tanks about these series of propaganda work, described it as 'not sophisticated' and Chinese authorities were not well prepared for the Hong Kong demonstration. I point out the possibility.

According to the New York Times, Twitter Twitter in China is still taking place. Nick Monaco of the Institute for the Future , a think tank in California, USA, reports that she has identified 30 accounts posting tweets close to the deleted Twitter account.

Welcome to the Party: A Data Analysis of Chinese Information Operations
https://medium.com/digintel/welcome-to-the-party-a-data-analysis-of-chinese-information-operations-6d48ee186939

When the New York Times presented Mr. Monaco's report to Twitter, Twitter deleted the account. However, Twitter remains silent on the relevance of the 200,000 accounts that Chinese authorities had been involved with and those that Monaco reported.

A spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs commented that he knew nothing about Twitter and Facebook removing accounts suspected of involving the Chinese government.