China Used Twitter Porn Accounts For Hong Kong Disinformation

As pro-Democracy protests continued throughout the summer in Hong Kong, with thousands of anti-government protesters taking to the streets of the iconic city, clashing frequently and often violently with riot police, China’s ruling Communist Party has waged information warfare against the protesters. The government has used both the country’s state-owned media outlets as well as social media controlled by China’s “Great Firewall” to spread propaganda and disinformation in an attempt to disrupt the protests, as The New York Times has reported. 

Now, a new study of China’s propaganda campaign against the protesters by an Australian think tank has found that the government even embedded disinformation in porn accounts on the social media platform Twitter.

Last month, Twitter shut down nearly 200,000 accounts based in China which its said were being utilized to undermine the protests with propaganda and fake news stories, according to Newsweek.  

The Australian researchers combed through 936 of those accounts, finding that prior to being turned into state-run Chinese propaganda accounts, some of the most popular now-deleted accounts tweeted out porn. Twitter remains one of the few major social media outlets that allows pornographic images and videos on its platform.  

Rather than create new accounts to disseminate its propaganda, the Chinese government chose to take over the porn accounts because they already came with sizable, built-in follower networks—and because the accounts had existed for several years before being used for propaganda, they appeared more legitimate than newly created accounts with few followers.

“When you scroll through Twitter and you click on them and see it was made last week, it looks suspicious, but if it’s five years old and has 3,000 followers or 30,000 followers, then it looks much more legitimate. That’s why people buy accounts like that,” said Elise Thomas, co-author of the report Tweeting through the Great Firewall issued by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“The network also included a LOT of former porn spam accounts, which made for an interesting week in the office,” Thomas added via her own Twitter  account.

Of the four accounts with the highest number of retweets of the 936 examined by the researchers, two were porn accounts, according to a Quartz report on the study. 

The researchers judged the Chinese propaganda campaign “primitive,” and easily detected by anyone willing to do even a modest investigation.

“You scratch the surface and you see something is not right. For example, if someone who clicks on one of those former porn bots tweeting about Hong Kong protests just scrolls down a bit, they would have seen a huge number of tweets about porn, which would have made them a little bit more suspicious,” Thomas told Quartz.

Photo By Voice of America / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain 

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