Spam networks tweeting propaganda about Xinjiang have been a recurring thing for the past year or so. Here's one such network that appears to be trying to get specific bloggers and journalists to notice specific Xinjiang-related YouTube videos.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This particular network consists of 354 accounts created between July 2019 and August 2021. Hilariously, the operators of the network on multiple occasions created multiple accounts in a row with the same name (e.g. @cumberland_ted and @ted_cumberland, created 4 minutes apart).
This network's content is repetitive, and mostly consists of articles and videos related to Xinjiang (both feel-good stories and denial of human rights abuses). Most of the repetitive tweets have at least two accounts tagged in them, generally bloggers and media accounts.
This network has tweeted via both the Twitter Web App and Twitter for Android, with most of the tweets from 2020 sent via the Twitter Web App and most of the tweets from 2021 sent via Twitter for Android.
As is often the case with astroturf networks, the accounts in this network (at least the ones with photos of human beings as their avatars) use stolen profile pics. Google was more effective than TinEye or Yandex at tracking these ones down.
We've seen a variety of astroturf networks spewing propaganda about Xinjiang before. Examples:
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