The research shows, for the first time, that large-scale false addition to the Chinese government's message constitutes an image of extensive support for its systems and actions.
China's state-controlled media outlets and politicians run hundreds of accounts on Twitter to promote the government's propaganda, and their posts can reach hundreds of millions of people, often without revealing that their content is government-sponsored, according to an investigation by Oxford University's Internet Institute and the Associated Press.
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The study investigated every tweet and Facebook post written by the People's Republic of China's diplomats and 10 of the largest state-controlled media outlets between June 2020 and February 2021 and found that the Twitter popularity of many of the Chinese diplomats, including China's ambassador to the United Kingdom, was enabled by a large number of fake accounts.
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"On Twitter, a considerable share of the engagement with PRC accounts on Twitter come from user accounts that the company eventually suspends for platform violations," the study wrote.
More than one in 10 of the retweets 189 Chinese diplomats racked up during the study's time frame came from Twitter accounts that had been barred by March of this year.
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Still, the Twitter bans did not restrain the Chinese government's propaganda machine. Other groups of fake accounts, many of them mimicking U.K. citizens, proceeded to spread PRC content before Twitter removed them from the platform last month and this month in response to Oxford's investigation.
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Twitter’s fake user suspensions often only happened after weeks or months of bad behavior, the study revealed.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it does not try to handle people on social media platforms.
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“There is no so-called misleading propaganda, nor exporting a model of online public opinion guidance,” the ministry said in a statement to Associated Press. “We hope that the relevant parties will abandon their discriminatory attitude, take off their tinted glasses, and take a peaceful, objective, and rational approach in the spirit of openness and inclusiveness.”
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