Twitter is already running for the intermediate sessions. Now comes Musk.
Twitter’s disclosure adds to what is known about Chinese efforts to influence the American public by imitating methods used through Russia-based agents to stoke cultural and political tensions in the 2016 election. In September, Meta announced that it had halted a China-based operation aimed at influencing U. S. policy. U. S. The U. S. governmentit has also issued warnings about China’s influence efforts, as has a series of reports from cybersecurity companies, adding Mandiant, Recorded Future and Google’s Alethea Group.
Graham Brookie, head of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, which also obtained the data, said tweets issued through Chinese networks largely magnify concepts emanating from members of American ideological extremes.
“This is a hyperpartisanship of equivalent opportunity, a tactic that has been followed more across Russia,” Brookie said, adding that the crusade is more assertive than beyond Chinese efforts. “It’s the same theory of the case: a weakened adversary is one that allows you to further shape geopolitics. “
One network Twitter removed, according to the data, included 22 user accounts who tweeted more than 250,000 times. Between April and early October, his messages were pro-Trump and conspiracy theorists, in addition to pandemic and coronavirus vaccines.
Alethea had concluded that China-linked accounts on Twitter and elsewhere continued with the department, but pushed the riots to the right rather than the left, with nods to conspiracy theories. In the recently suspended lot, an account tweeted in May that former President Barack Obama was a “lizard-type member of the Illuminati,” according to a copy of the tweet archived via the Internet Archive.
Twitter said that while many of the network’s accounts were believed to be located in the United States, the company discovered technical signals indicating that many were founded in China. Twitter got rid of the accounts because they violated company rules against platform manipulation and spam, the company said.
While the network was small, some of its users attracted high levels of engagement. One such account, called Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe, from Obama’s tweet, attracted 26,000 followers, more than 400,000 likes and more than 180,000 retweets before being deleted.
In May, Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe tweeted a meme with a photo holding a paper near a purported urn with the caption “MULE TAKING PICTURES!PROOF OF THE CRIME IS REQUIRED TO BE PAID BY THE DNC. In June, the account tweeted a comment that suggests young people on the transgender network are simply impressionable and abused by their parents, according to archived copies.
Facebook’s parent company dismantles China-based network for U. S. users
Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe has also participated in “Trump trains,” where popular right-wing users urge their audiences to stick to other pro-Trump Twitter users.
Another account on that network, “Salome Cliff,” took a more liberal view, saying Trump was going after minorities and praising Biden as “balanced, calm and collected. “This account, the most popular account of the moment in the network linked to China, after Bella, had around 7000 subscribers but less participation, earning less than 1% of Bella’s total.
Stanford’s DiResta said the 10Votes account acts as a moderator on Reddit’s discussion forum Political_Revolution, which has more than 100,000 followers. A recent 10Votes article quoting Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman garnered more than 800 positive votes in the past 12 days. (On Twitter, 10Votes said its call stemmed from Bernie Sanders’ first margin of victory when he elected mayor of Burlington, Vt. )
Reddit blocked the 10Votes account last week and coordinated influencer campaigns are banned.
Another China-based account deleted via Twitter combined anti-Russian messages with what in the text appeared to be politically tainted pro-Trump pornography.
An Iran-based network also controlled to garner nearly 25,000 fans and millions of likes on its tweets, which interspersed liberal anti-Trump messages with harsh anti-Israel slogans. Users who ask users to adhere to other “resistant” ones. The Iran-based network also included at least one supposedly conservative user, but DiResta said they were more commonly “left-wing figures,” adding one posing as an advocacy group, 10Votes.
She said 10 votes make the negative votes a new territory for foreign influence efforts.
Two other China-based accounts didn’t get as much share of their tweets, according to Twitter data. In one ring, two accounts posing as Florida liberals, post about guns and Marco Rubio; None of his tweets received more than a hundred likes or retweets.
Twitter also got rid of a network that included more than 1900 accounts posting blatantly pro-Chinese narratives in English and Chinese. Many tweets from this network directly echoed the rhetoric of the Chinese government, adding condemnations on the scale of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan this year.
“It’s an extension of the more assertive tone you heard from President Xi at the conference a few weeks ago,” Brookie said. “This tone is conveyed to Chinese actors and Chinese neighbors on social media. “
China is Russia’s toughest weapon for data warfare
According to researchers, in the early months of the war in Ukraine, China became a difficult outlet for Kremlin disinformation, presenting Ukraine and NATO as the aggressors and sharing false claims about neo-Nazis through the Ukrainian government. Chinese channels touted the false claim that the United States runs biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and warned that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was being manipulated through American billionaire George Soros.
In September, Meta announced that it had taken action against a China-based network that included at least Facebook accounts and two Instagram accounts seeking to influence U. S. politics ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Users have posed as Americans to post reviews on issues such as abortion, gun control and high-profile politicians like Biden and Rubio (R-Fla. ), who will face the electorate next week. The network didn’t seem to gain much traction, or user engagement and content posted during operating hours in China rather than at times when its target audience in the U. S. was in China. The U. S. would be awake, according to the company.
An earlier edition of this story incorrectly stated that Alethea Group had won a copy of Twitter’s data. He didn’t; Their conclusions were based on their own research. This edition has been corrected.