Facebook and Twitter are accusing China of running a disinformation campaign against the protesters in Hong Kong, according to their blog posts on Monday, and are no longer accepting advertising dollars from the state-controlled news media entities.

"We are disclosing a significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong, specifically the protest movement and their calls for political change," Twitter wrote in its blog.

The social media giant outlined 936 accounts which were from inside the People's Republic of China and disclosed "a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000 accounts" were also suspended due to their connection to this possible disinformation campaign.

"Overall, these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground," Twitter wrote.

Facebook joined the fight on Monday as well, saying they "removed seven pages, three groups and five Facebook accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong."

Facebook claims the people behind the social media campaign used fake accounts to manage pages that appeared to be news organizations.

"Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the Chinese government," Facebook wrote in its blog.

"Specifically, we identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests," Twitter wrote.

Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, but some people access their accounts by using a virtual private network (VPN).

"We will continue to be vigilant, learning from this network and proactively enforcing our policies to serve the public conversation," Twitter wrote.

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Both Twitter and Facebook say they are sharing the issue in an effort to be more transparent. </s> Twitter and Facebook have landed in hot water for allowing Chinese state-run media outlets to run ads on their platforms that criticize pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

In response, Twitter said Monday that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news media outlets. The company also said that it suspended 936 accounts from China that attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong including efforts to undermine the protests in Hong Kong.

Facebook said that it pulled down 5 Facebook accounts, 7 Pages and 3 Groups with ties to people linked to the Chinese government after it got a tip from Twitter. These users posted about political topics including the Hong Kong protests, but the social network said they were suspending the accounts, pages and groups for misleading others about their identity and purpose.

The moves by the social networks come amid criticism that the companies aren't doing enough to combat disinformation and propaganda on their platforms. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of peaceful activists took to the streets of Hong Kong for the 11th week of demonstrations, CNN reported. Protesters were initially rallying against a now-suspended bill by the Hong Kong government that would have allowed people arrested Hong Kong to be transferred and tried in mainland China. Since then, the protests have expanded to include calls for more democracy and government accountability, according to CNN. Protesters have clashed with police in Hong Kong, who have reportedly fired tear gas and beat activists with batons, according to various media reports.

Now some of the world's largest social networks are under fire for the role they're playing in these political protests. Facebook and Twitter are both blocked in China, but businesses and organizations can still run ads on these platforms.

Maciej Ceglowski, developer of the social-media bookmarking site Pinboard, called on Twitter over the weekend to stop selling ads to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. One promoted tweet from the news outlet stated that "the escalating violence in Hong Kong has taken a heavy toll on the social order" and that "all walks of life in Hong Kong called for a brake to be put on the blatant violence and for order to be restored."

The Xinhua News Agency didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter pointed to their blog posts about changes to their ads policy and the Chinese accounts the company removed for violating its rules against spam, fake accounts and other forms of "platform manipulation."

Chinese state-run media outlets were also using Facebook to display ads critical of Hong Kong protesters. One ad about the Hong Kong protests by Xinhua states that "calls are mounting for immediate actions to restore order," according to Facebook's ad library. Another ad says that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has voiced her support for the protesters, "should fly to Hong Kong to see what the true facts are." </s> Protesters attend a rally at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. Heavy rain fell on tens of thousands of umbrella-toting protesters Sunday as they marched from a packed park and filled a major road in Hong Kong, where mass pro-democracy demonstrations have become a regular weekend activity over the summer. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter said it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that it believes were part of a Chinese government influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.

The company also said Monday it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.

Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticized for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organizations.

The accounts were suspended for violating the social networking platform’s terms of service and “because we think this is not how people can come to Twitter to get informed,” the official said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media.

After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.

The Chinese government said Tuesday it wasn’t aware of the allegations.

Facebook, which is more widely used in Hong Kong, does not release data on such state-backed influence operations. Neither does it ban ads from state-owned media companies.

“We continue to look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “We’re also taking a closer look at ads that have been raised to us to determine if they violate our policies.”

Twitter traced the Hong Kong campaign to two fake Chinese and English Twitter accounts that pretended to be news organizations based in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrators have taken to the streets since early June calling for full democracy and an inquiry into what they say is police violence against protesters.

The Chinese language account, @HKpoliticalnew, and the English account, @ctcc507, pushed tweets depicting protesters as violent criminals in a campaign aimed at influencing public opinion around the world. One of those accounts was tied to a suspended Facebook account that went by the same moniker: HKpoliticalnew.

An additional 936 core accounts Twitter believes originated from within China attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong by undermining the protest movement’s legitimacy and political positions.

About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network. Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.

The Twitter official said the investigation remains ongoing and there could be further disclosures.

Though Twitter, Facebook and most other foreign social media platforms are banned in China, they’re available in semiautonomous Hong Kong.

At a daily briefing Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was “not aware” of the allegations of fake accounts, but added that Chinese people had the right to “express their opinions about” the situation in Hong Kong.

The free speech organization PEN America welcomed the tech companies’ actions and urged them to do more.

“China’s government has denied its citizens access to global outlets for communication. That they now turn around and stealthily unleash a campaign of disinformation on the very same platforms represents a new height of hypocrisy,” chief executive Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.

The Twitter campaign reflects that the Chinese government has studied the role of social media in mass movements and fears the Hong Kong protests could spark wider unrest, said James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This is standard Chinese practice domestically, and we know that after 2016 they studied what the Russians did in the U.S. carefully,” Lewis said. “So it sounds like this is the first time they’re deploying their new toy.”

Twitter has sought to more aggressively monitor its network for malicious political activity since the 2016 presidential election and to be more transparent about its investigations, publicly releasing data about state-backed influence operations since October so others can evaluate it, the official said.

“We’re not only telling the public this happened, we’re also putting the data out there so people can study it for themselves,” the official said.

As for state-backed media organizations, they are still allowed to use Twitter, but are no longer allowed to pay for ads, which show up regardless of whether you have elected to follow the group’s tweet.

Twitter declined to provide a list of what it considers state-backed media organizations, but a representative said it may consider doing so in the future. In 2017, Twitter specifically announced it would ban Russia-based RT and Sputnik from advertising on its platform.

Associated Press writer Chris Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.

This story has been corrected to attribute PEN America statement to the chief executive, not the spokesman. </s> Beijing — China said on Tuesday that it has the right to put out its own views after Twitter and Facebook said they had dismantled a state-backed social media campaign originating in mainland China that sought to undermine protests in Hong Kong.

Twitter said on Monday that it suspended 936 accounts and the operations appeared to be a co-ordinated, state-backed effort originating in China.

Facebook said it had removed accounts and pages from a small network after a tip from Twitter, saying its investigation found links to individuals associated with the Chinese government.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang declined direct comment on the Twitter and Facebook actions, but defended the right of Chinese people and media to make their voices heard over the Hong Kong protests.

Overseas Chinese and students “of course have the right to express their point of view”, he told a daily news briefing. “What is happening in Hong Kong, and what the truth is, people will naturally have their own judgment. Why is it that China’s official media’s presentation is surely negative or wrong?”

Twitter and Facebook have come under fire from users over showing ads from state-controlled media that criticise the Hong Kong protesters. Twitter said on Monday that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news media, and told Reuters the change was not related to the suspended accounts.

Twitter and Facebook are blocked by the Chinese government from being used on the mainland, but are freely accessible in Hong Kong, where protests since June have plunged the Chinese-ruled territory into its most serious crisis in decades.

Chinese media use foreign social media to communicate with people around the world to introduce them to Chinese policies and “tell China’s story”, Geng said. “I don’t know why certain companies or peoples’ reaction is so strong.”

The Hong Kong protests present one of the biggest challenges for China’s President Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012. They began in opposition to a now-suspended bill that would allow suspects to be sent to the mainland for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts, but have since swelled into wider calls for democracy.

Social media companies globally are under pressure to stem illicit political influence campaigns online, especially ahead of the US presidential election in November 2020. A 22-month US investigation concluded Russia interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” in the 2016 US election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. </s> Twitter has removed more than 10,000 accounts aiming to discourage people from voting in the US midterm elections on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

A Twitter representative confirmed the social media site deleted several automated accounts sharing misinformation, but couldn't confirm the 10,000 figure. The company removed the accounts in September and October, Reuters reports.

The accounts were reportedly made to look like they were from Democrats, but the party reported the tweets to Twitter. The accounts also appeared to be domestic. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

"For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties," a Twitter representative said. "We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion - a violation of our policies. We stopped this quickly and at its source."

Twitter has been working to step up its fight against fake accounts. In July, it was reported that the social media company was suspending 1 million accounts a day in its fight against disinformation. In a June blog post, Twitter said it's "now removing 214 percent more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis." Twitter's efforts to combat bots and trolls comes as it deals with revelations that Russian-linked social media troll accounts may have influenced the 2016 US presidential election. </s> Twitter Inc. on Thursday, April 5, said that it has suspended 1.21 million accounts between August 2015 and end of 2017 on grounds of "violations related to the promotion of terrorism". It also added that the number of such accounts was seeing a drop.

The social media said 2,74,460 of these accounts were suspended in late 2017 which was 8.4 per cent less from the previous reporting period and the second consecutive period in which Twitter witnessed a reduction in the number of accounts suspended owing to the same reason. The microblogging site said this in a blog post which covered its 12th biannual "transparency report".

It was also informed by Twitter that 74 per cent of the accounts covered in the latest period of reporting were suspended even before the posting the first tweet.

Twitter expressed a sense of satisfaction saying its hard work over the years in making the social media platform an unsuitable place "for those seeking to promote terrorism" paid off and now the tendency has gone down.

It also said that a majority of the accounts suspended in late 2017 "were flagged by internal, proprietary tools" and government's reports on such violations accounted for only 0.2 per cent of all suspensions.

Twitter began its 'cleanliness drive' in 2014 after facing criticism that it wasn't doing enough to stop people who were using it with sinister designs of promoting extremism.

In December 2015, after 14 people were massacred in a shooting at San Bernardino, California, the then US president Barack Obama approached Twitter and other tech companies with the plea to make it difficult for the terrorists to use technology to evade justice.

Twitter also faced the wrath of the kin of the victims of the 2015 attack in May last year along with Google and Facebook as they filed a federal lawsuit against the tech giants accusing them of purposefully backing the Islamic State terrorist outfit.

For breaking news & Instant updates throughout the day </s> A 3D-printed logo for Twitter is seen in this picture illustration on January 26, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc on Thursday said it removed thousands of accounts linked to coordinated, state-backed activities it believes were from the Iranian government and archived them to its public database launched last year.

In the latest purge of information, the company said it believes 4,779 accounts were associated or backed by Iran.

The micro-blogging site also said it had removed and archived four accounts affiliated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm” that has been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller for attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

It also removed and archived 130 accounts tied to the Catalan independence movement in Spain, and 33 accounts engaged in manipulative behavior related to Venezuela.

Twitter first released the archive of data associated with known state-backed information operations last October to provide more transparency of information and to stem manipulation on its platform.

“Thousands of researchers from across the globe have downloaded datasets, which contain more than 30 million Tweets and over 1 terabyte of media, using our archive to conduct their own investigations and to share their insights and independent analysis with the world,” Twitter said in a blog post. </s> Twitter has deleted thousands of automated accounts that tried to discourage users from voting in the upcoming midterm elections, the company confirmed Friday. The accounts originated in the U.S. and were determined to be more mischievous than an organized plot.

"We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion — a violation of our policies," a Twitter spokesperson said. "We stopped this quickly and at its source. "

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) flagged the malicious accounts to Twitter officials, Reuters reports. The tweets included several that said male Democrats should refrain from voting to avoid drowning out the voices of women, sources told the news agency.

"For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties," the Twitter spokesperson said.

Earlier this year, Twitter reportedly suspended 70 million fake and suspicious accounts and identified 3,814 accounts that were believed to be propaganda from the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency.

The accounts were taken down in late September and early October, Reuters reports. </s> Twitter has now blocked more than 1 million terrorism accounts from its service.

The social network on Thursday published a blog post detailing the highlights from its 12th biannual Twitter Transparency Report, where it reveals information about accounts it’s removed, inquiries from governments, and data requests. In that post, Twitter revealed that it removed nearly 275,000 terrorist accounts between July 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017. While that was down 8.4% compared to the prior period, the company revealed that it has now banned more than 1.2 million terrorist accounts from its service since August 2015.

In the blog post, the company said that it’s been working for years at making Twitter “an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism.” The company added that online terrorist-related activity is now “increasingly shifting away from Twitter.”

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Like other major tech companies, Twitter shares transparency reports to shed light on what kinds of content is on its network and why certain accounts were removed. In some cases, those accounts are suspended or data accessed because of legal orders or warrants. In others, accounts simply violate Twitter’s terms of service and are removed.

Terrorist organizations have long used social media and other popular services to spread propaganda and recruit new members into their organizations. And although Twitter was quick to celebrate its terrorist-related suspensions, the sheer number of removals in the last quarter, alone, suggest the service is still a sought-after spot for terrorists to land.

According to Twitter, 93% of the terrorist accounts were spotted by its own technologies and nearly three-quarters of accounts were banned before they could post their first tweet. Governments stepped in to alert Twitter to terrorist accounts in 0.2% of cases in the second half of 2017.
Twitter says it has suspended more than 200,000 automated accounts on the social media site that it believes were part of a Chinese government-run campaign to spread misinformation about the protests in Hong Kong.