China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

By Echo Huang September 3, 2019

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A report from Canberra-based think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published today (Sept. 3) said that some Twitter accounts at the center of Beijing’s recent online campaign had been tweeting a range a content including pornography, soccer, and K-pop prior to disseminating content about Hong Kong. At least two of the four accounts with the most retweets were related to pornography.

Link to tweet

Those accounts were among the 936 China-linked accounts that Twitter suspended last month because they were attempting to “sow political discord in Hong Kong.” Twitter made the data about those accounts public.

“Such accounts are readily and cheaply available for purchase from resellers, often for a few dollars or less,” said ASPI in the report. The accounts tweeted information about Hong Kong without aiming their message at any audience in particular as a sort of “marketing spam network.”

Whoever purchased those accounts was likely hoping that their large follower count could make the content coming from those accounts look more legitimate, said Elise Thomas, a co-author of the report. “When you scroll through Twitter and you click on them and see it was made last week, it looks suspicious, but if it’s five years old and has 3,000 followers or 30,000 followers then it looks much more legitimate. That’s why people buy accounts like that.”

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