Comment Twitter busted three Chinese firms that were secretly trying to influence US politics in the months before the midterm elections by amplifying politically polarizing issues, according to a compilation of data the social media giant released to researchers and the Washington Post. The businesses covered nearly 2,000 user accounts, some purportedly located in the United States, and weighed in on a wide variety of issues, including allegations of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and criticism of members of the transgender community. Two of the three networks favored the US right and one shifted to the left. At least some repeated pro-China narratives aimed at American audiences. Twitter also took down three networks that were based in Iran but often claimed to be based in the United States or Israel, the data show. At least one of the accounts involved in the Iranian efforts, 10Votes81, endorsed candidates even in local races. An account called 10Votes and using the same logo as an avatar was also active on YouTube, TikTok and especially Reddit, said Renée DiResta of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, one of the recipients of the data. Twitter said in its disclosure to investigators that it does not attribute the activity to specific governments. Twitter did not respond to a request for further comment. China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter’s axing of the networks, which mostly operated between April and October, came at a tumultuous time for the social media giant as it prepared to be sold to billionaire Elon Musk and faced continued scrutiny over how it whom he is verifying disinformation ahead of next week’s midterm presidential elections, when political control of Congress is under scrutiny. Twitter and other tech platforms have struggled in particular to curb the spread of false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and to tone down suggestions of fraud in the upcoming contests. Twitter was already striving for the in-between. Now comes Musk. The Twitter disclosure adds to what is known about China-based efforts to influence the American public by mimicking the strategies used by Russian operatives to stoke cultural and political tensions during the 2016 election. In September, Meta announced that busted a China-based business that seeks to influence US policy. The US government has also issued warnings about Chinese influence efforts, as have a number of reports from cybersecurity firms including Mandiant, Recorded Future and Google’s Alethea Group. Graham Brookey, head of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which also obtained the data, said the tweets issued by the Chinese networks largely reinforced ideas coming from members of America’s ideological fringes. “This is equal opportunity hyper-partisanship, a tactic that has been adopted more by Russia,” said Brucki, who added that the campaign was more aggressive than previous Chinese efforts. “It’s the same theory of the case: A weakened adversary is one that allows you to shape geopolitics more.” One network that Twitter removed, the data showed, included 22 user accounts that tweeted more than 250,000 times. Between April and early October, Their posts were generally pro-Trump and conspiratorial, particularly regarding pandemic and coronavirus vaccines. Alethea, another recipient of the data, concluded that China-linked accounts on Twitter and elsewhere seek divisiveness, but engage issues of the right more than the left, sometimes with a nod to conspiracy theories. In the newly suspended batch, one account tweeted in May that former President Barack Obama was a “lizard man who is a member of the Illuminati.” according to a copy of the tweet archived by the Internet Archive. Twitter said that while many of the network’s accounts were supposed to be in the United States, the company discovered technical signals indicating that many of them were based in China. Twitter removed the accounts because they violated the company’s rules against platform manipulation and spam, the company said. While the network was small, some of its users attracted high levels of loyalty. One of those accounts, which went by the name Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe, author of Obama’s tweet, attracted 26,000 followers, more than 400,000 likes and more than 180,000 retweets before it was taken down. In May, Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe tweeted a meme with a picture of someone holding paper near a supposed ballot box with the caption “MULE TAKING PICS! EVIDENCE OF A CRIME IS REQUIRED TO GET PAID BY THE DNC.” In June, the account posted a comment on Twitter implying that transgender children are simply impressionable and abused by their parents, according to archived transcripts. Facebook’s parent company is dismantling a China-based network targeting American users The Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe has also frequently participated in “Trump trains” – where popular right-wing users encourage their audience to follow other pro-Trump Twitter users. Another account on that network, “Salome Cliff,” took a more liberal perspective, saying Donald Trump is persecuting minorities and praising Joe Biden as “calm, calm and collected.” That account, the second most popular account on the China-linked network after Bella, had about 7,000 followers but far less engagement, earning less than 1 percent of Bella’s total. Stanford’s DiResta said the 10Votes account acted as a moderator on Reddit’s Political_Revolution discussion board, which has more than 100,000 subscribers. A recent 10-upvote post mentioning Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has garnered more than 800 upvotes in the past 12 days. (On Twitter, 10Votes said its name came from Bernie Sanders’ first margin of victory when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt.) Reddit said it had locked the 10Votes account last week and that coordinated influence campaigns are prohibited. Another China-based account removed from Twitter combines anti-Russia posts with what the text appears to be politically-tinged pro-Trump pornography. An Iran-based network also managed to amass nearly 25,000 followers and millions of likes on its tweets, which interspersed liberal anti-Trump messages with harsh anti-Israel slogans. He also appears to have taken advantage of the fact that he is on lists of liberal Twitter users asking users to follow fellow “dissidents.” The Iran-based network also included at least one alleged conservative user, but DiResta said they were mostly “leftist figures,” including what it posed as an advocacy group, 10Votes. He said the 10 Digits making endorsements down was new ground for foreign influence efforts. Two other accounts based in China didn’t have as much engagement with their tweets, Twitter data shows. On one network, two accounts posed as Florida liberals, posting about gun control and Marco Rubio. none of their tweets got more than 100 likes or retweets. Twitter also took down a network that included more than 1,900 accounts that often openly posted pro-China narratives in both English and Chinese. Many of that network’s tweets directly echoed Chinese government rhetoric, particularly in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) condemnation of Taiwan this year. “It’s an extension of the more assertive tone you heard from President Xi at the party congress a few weeks ago,” Brookie said. “This tone comes down to Chinese and Chinese-adjacent social media actors.” China is Russia’s most powerful information warfare weapon In the early months of the war in Ukraine, China became a powerful outlet for Kremlin disinformation, portraying Ukraine and NATO as aggressors and spreading false claims of neo-Nazi control of the Ukrainian government, according to researchers. Chinese channels floated the false claim that the United States was running bioweapons labs in Ukraine and suggested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was being manipulated by American billionaire George Soros. In September, Meta announced that it had taken action against a China-based network that included at least 81 Facebook accounts and two Instagram accounts that were trying to influence US politics ahead of the 2022 midterms. Users posed as Americans to post opinions on issues such as abortion, gun control and high-profile politicians like Biden and Rubio (R-Fla.), who faces voters next week. The network did not appear to have much traction or user engagement and often posted content during business hours in China rather than when its target audience in the United States was awake, according to the company.
