The company said the account “spread geopolitical narratives that benefited the Chinese Communist Party” and was removed for violating its platform manipulation policy.
The removal of Twitter is the latest development in Silicon Valley’s attempt to frustrate the government using social media platforms to encourage narration in their favor.
Twitter is officially blocked in China, although many people in that country can access it using VPN. Among the targets of the Chinese campaign were overseas Chinese “in an effort to exploit their capacity to expand party-state influence,” according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a group that works with Twitter to analyze accounts. Twitter said the accounts were tweeted “mostly in Chinese.”
Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who also analyzed the account, said that many of those who posted about Covid-19 throughout the spring were only founded in late January.
“The narrative around Covid,” the SIO wrote in his analysis, “praised China’s response to the virus while the tweet also used a pandemic to antagonize US and Hong Kong activists.”
Twitter said it had identified 23,750 accounts which it referred to as “a very involved core network” used to tweet favorable content to Beijing and 150,000 further accounts used to strengthen content, for example, by retweeting content posted by core accounts.
23,750 accounts collectively tweeted 348,608 times, according to researchers at Stanford.
Twitter says many accounts have been identified earlier and hence have a low number of followers and low involvement.
This is not the first action taken by Twitter. In August 2019, the company deleted less than 1,000 accounts believed to be operating in mainland China to “deliberately and specifically try to sow political strife in Hong Kong.”
The company also announced Thursday that it had closed accounts related to Russia and Turkey.
Twitter found more than 1,000 accounts promoting the ruling United Russia party.
In Turkey, a network of 7,340 accounts posted content supporting the AK Party from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Stanford researchers say the account has tweeted 37 million times.
Tweets from many closed Twitter accounts will be posted by companies to the archive where they can be studied.
