Twitter Removes China Misinformation Campaign: after I published the #KarakaxList, a major state media smear campaign against me ensued, and was amplified by 100s of suspicious accounts, including one that impersonated me. nytimes.com/2020/06/11/tec…
Global Times smear pieces were re-tweeted 100s of times, by accounts with 0-3 followers, often sexually-suggestive (or at least attractive) user profile pics, very similar messages, etc. I am still trying to get over the fact that this bot called me ugly. Just kidding.
Their first strategy was to troll my most tweets - typically of new original research articles, starting w/ my work on parent-child separation in July 2019. When this re-occurred with the China Cables in Nov 2019, I ruthlessly blocked them all. Then, they changed tactics.
Starting in Dec 2019 with research on forced labor but especially in Feb 2020 with the Karakax list, Beijing's strategy shifted to publishing lots of dedicated state media pieces. These were then amplified by bot accounts, often through dedicated RTs or replies.
In recent weeks, Twitter has deleted 100,000s such accounts. I have lost 100s of "follower" accounts, almost all of which had close to zero followers. But some "echo chamber" accounts survived: some have a few followers, others can only boast a half-way correct English sentence.
This account who amplified a such smear piece, with 0 followers, 0 following, and a sexually-suggestive crop of a female as profile image, was not removed. It re-tweeted various Chinese State media smear or propaganda pieces on Xinjiang, but stopped doing so in early March.
It did not chip into the COVID misinformation campaign and has no recent activity, which might be the reason that it was not removed. However, such accounts can lie dormant for a while and be re-activated at any time.
Most accounts that amplified the second smear article against me survive to this day. Some of them have recent tweets, but they only focus on Xinjiang. The Twitter misinformation removal campaign apparently did not focus on removing bot accounts with a focus on Xinjiang.
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