A bevy of identically-phrased questions that not so subtly imply a US role in the origin of the novel #coronavirus have been making the rounds on Twitter the last few days. What's up with that?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The questions were first tweeted by @hwborges on 4/30, and appear to have been taken from an editorial in Chinese newspaper People's Daily. It was copy-pasted by obscure Twitter accounts for nearly 3 hours before appearing on People's Daily's official Facebook or Twitter feed.
Thus far, 352 accounts have tweeted one or more of the 10 conspiracy-tinged questions verbatim, for a total of 1668 tweets. Although the traffic mostly doesn't look automated, it also doesn't look entirely authentic for reasons beyond the repetition. . .
First, a lot of the accounts are new. 232 of 352 (65.9%) were created in 2019 or later, and 133 (37.8%) are less than 4 months old. Also, most haven't tweeted much; 237 (67.3%) have fewer than 100 tweets and 76 (21.6%) have fewer than 10.
Although the cloned tweets are in English, a significant minority (29.7%) of the accounts tweeting them actually tweet in Chinese the majority of the time. A repeated theme for those that do tweet in English: attacks on the 2019/2020 #HongKongProtests.
Finally, the accounts posting the cloned #coronavirus tweets suggesting US involvement in the origins of COVID-19 have similar taste in who they amplify. The top nine accounts they retweet (and many other frequent fliers) are all Chinese government or Chinese state media feeds.
