Twitter suspends over 200,000 accounts which it believes are part of a Chinese government's online campaign targeting anti-Beijing protesters in Hong Kong
Anti-extradition demonstrators march to call for democratic reforms, in Hong Kong, China July 21, 2019.
Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticised for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organisations.
Facebook, which is more widely used in Hong Kong, does not release the data on such state-backed influence operations. About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network. Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.The Twitter campaign reflects the fact that the Chinese government has studied the role of social media in mass movements and fears the Hong Kong protests could spark wider unrest, said James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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