Twitter Scarps Chinese State Accounts Amplifying Xinjiang Rumors

On Dec. 2, Twitter removed two Chinese state-linked influence operations: 2,048 accounts that boosted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives about Xinjiang and the Uyghur population, and 112 accounts attributed to Changyu Culture, a private firm acting on behalf of the Xinjiang regional government, Josh A. Goldstein and Renee DiResta wrote for Foreign Policy.

Photo Insert: The two networks amplified pro-CCP narratives about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, often posting content from Chinese state media or sharing first-person Uyghur testimonial videos about how great their life is in the province.

Goldstein, a Center for International Security and Cooperation postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, analyzed those two networks.

Both of them found the two networks amplified pro-CCP narratives about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, often posting content from Chinese state media or sharing first-person Uyghur testimonial videos about how great their life is in the province.

As with past Twitter takedowns of pro-CCP networks, accounts in the first network were thinly veiled: Rather than presenting the account holders as plausible real people, they often featured default or stock profile images, only occasionally contained a bio, and showed little history of posting content that predated the topic of the operation.

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