China Used Twitter To Disrupt Hong Kong Protests, But Efforts Began Years Earlier
Social media networks banned hundreds of thousands of accounts last month. In NPR's assessment of the data, telling details begin to depict large disinformation campaigns.
Twitter and Facebook last month suspended hundreds of thousands of accounts and operations that they said were part of a Chinese state-linked disinformation campaign designed to discredit pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
A few days later, Google followed suit, banning 210 YouTube channels that it said it had identified as part of a similar disinformation effort.
Twitter published a list of the most active 936 accounts it banned and more than 3.6 million of their tweets, but it has not detailed how it ascertained that the accounts were connected to the Chinese state.
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In its statement, Twitter highlighted behaviors that allowed it to trace many of these accounts to
