It’s no secret that China attempts to influence online discussion through the use of social media. The scale of its propaganda efforts became slightly clearer last Thursday, when Twitter announced that it had removed from its website over 170,000 accounts it says were created by the Chinese government to spread disinformation, in addition to other accounts owned by Russia and Turkey. The Chinese accounts mostly boosted Chinese Communist Party narratives about the democracy movement in Hong Kong, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, China’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, and, to a significantly smaller extent, Taiwan.
Removing those accounts — some 23,000 of which were “highly engaged,” while around 150,000 just retweeted and liked posts — solidified Twitter’s reputation for proactively responding to state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and a China hawk rumored to have 2024 presidential ambitions, praised the move. And when contrasted with recent revelations that Zoom censored calls where topics politically sensitive to Beijing were discussed, Twitter’s decision seems like an even bigger PR coup.
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