Hong Kong: Twitter, Facebook call out China's fake news campaign against protesters

China is infamous for blocking foreign social networks, including Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, it has now turned out that China has allegedly used the two social media giants to spread political discord in Hong Kong in the ongoing pro-democracy protests. 

Both Twitter and Facebook on Monday announced that they have suspended accounts that they believe were part of a covert state-backed social media campaign run from China to undermine ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong. This is the first time both the social media companies have put the Chinese government at the heart of a fake news campaign. 

Twitter disclosed that it has suspended "936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China (PRC)". An additional 200,000 accounts were acted upon even before they became active. "A larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000 accounts — many created following our initial suspensions — were proactively suspended before they were substantially active on the service," Twitter added. The accounts have been suspended for spamming, coordinated activity, fake accounts, attributed activity and ban evasion.

Even though Twitter is banned in China, the suspended accounts were accessing it via virtual private networks and re-routed their traffic to make it appear like it was coming from another country. "However, some accounts accessed Twitter from specific unblocked IP addresses originating in mainland China," the micro-blogging site explained in its blog. 

Consequently, Twitter has also updated its global advertising policies on state media. "Going forward, we will not accept advertising from state-controlled news media entities," Twitter stated. It clarified that the affected accounts will be free to continue to use Twitter to engage in public conversation. 

However, Twitter's advertising products would be inaccessible for such accounts. "We believe that there is a difference between engaging in conversation with accounts you choose to follow and the content you see from advertisers in your Twitter experience which may be from accounts you're not currently following. We have policies for both, but we have higher standards for our advertisers". 

Twitter, however, clarified that the policy will not apply to taxpayer-funded entities, including independent public broadcasters.

Facebook also steps up

Thanks to Twitter's tip-off, Facebook stated that it has removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts that were targeting anti-government protesters in Hong Kong. "About 15,500 accounts followed one or more of these pages and about 2,200 accounts joined at least one of these groups," said Facebook's cybersecurity policy head Nathaniel Gleicher.

The individuals behind the campaign engaged in a number of deceptive tactics, including using fake accounts, managing pages posing as news organisations, posting in groups, disseminating their content, and also driving people to off-platform news sites. "Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the Chinese government," Facebook said exposing Chinese hands behind the targeted misinformation campaign.