Months-long protests in Hong Kong have escalated and roughly 1.7 million protesters took to the streets this past weekend. Protesters rallied against a now-withdrawn bill that might place Hong Kong residents under the jurisdiction of courts controlled by the Communist Party of China. In response, China launched a massive propaganda campaign on Facebook and Twitter, aimed at delegitimizing the protesters even as Chinese armed forces moved South to threaten Hong Kong.
Facebook and Twitter shut down the propaganda efforts Monday, but only after they had gained steam on the social media platforms.
The social media site Pinboard reported seeing ads from Xinhua News Agency, the official state-run press agency of China’s government, on Twitter, among news of the protests in Hong Kong.
“Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags,” the site reported.
Xinhua News claimed that residents of Hong Kong are furious with the protesters, calling them a threat to the social order.
Last year, the U.S. Justice Department flagged Xinhua News and its global television network as “foreign agents.” China’s repressive government restricts the use of social media, including WeChat along with Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, Twitter is blocked in China, but Xinhua News and other propaganda sources set up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to get on the platform, anyway.
As Forbes‘s Zak Doffman pointed out, “For the news agencies to promote the interests of their state-controllers is to be expected, but clearly the sophistication of targeting enabled by social media platforms provides an opportunity to deliver those messages very specifically. And that, for many, is the issue with what Twitter has allowed to happen here.”
On Monday, Twitter took the unusual step of disclosing “a significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong, specifically the protest movement and their calls for political change.”
full story at https://pjmedia.com/trending/china-launches-massive-twitter-facebook-propaganda-campaign-against-hong-kong-protesters/