China has stepped up its effort to spread misinformation on Twitter, creating tens of thousands of fake accounts that discussed protests in Hong Kong and the Communist Party’s response to the coronavirus, Twitter said on Thursday.

The company said it had discovered and removed 23,750 accounts that were “highly engaged” in a coordinated effort to spread misinformation. Twitter said it also took down about 150,000 accounts that were dedicated to boosting China’s messages by retweeting and liking the content.

Twitter’s findings were consistent with a recent New York Times analysis of roughly 4,600 accounts that engaged with Chinese leaders on Twitter. The Times found hundreds of accounts with underdeveloped personas that appeared to operate solely to cheer on and amplify China’s leading envoys and state-run news outlets.

While previous misinformation campaigns from China have focused on opposing and demeaning the Hong Kong protests, the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, and Taiwan, Twitter said the recently discovered batch included new messages promoting the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak.

The Trump administration has sparred with Beijing over the pandemic, saying that China mishandled the outbreak, which is believed to have started in Wuhan. Chinese officials on Twitter have fought back, suggesting without evidence that the virus originated in the US.

Until early February, for example, the Twitter accounts accused Hong Kong protesters and pro-democracy activists of overhyping the threat of the virus and using rumours as “panic bullets”.

But as the extent of the outbreak became clearer, the narrative shifted. In March, the accounts praised China as a “responsible big country” and called on the US to “put aside political bias” so it could learn from China’s response, according to an analysis of the accounts by Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, criticised Twitter for leaving untouched posts that accused China of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

“China’s efforts and achievements in fighting the coronavirus epidemic are real and obvious to all,” Hua said. “Apart from those with extreme malice who slander China, the unbiased people of the international community can all see it clearly and hold a high degree of approval.”

The accounts were uncovered in recent weeks, soon after they were created, and were generally not sophisticated enough to fool a viewer into believing they were operated by real people, Twitter said.

New York Times News Service