MAGA porn, hate for Trump: China-based accounts stoke division
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/01/china-midterms-twitter-networks/
https://archive.ph/1hov8
MAGA porn, hate for Trump: China-based accounts stoke division
A fake China-based account called MAGA Hot Babe was among nearly 2,000 that sought to influence Americas midterms and were removed by Twitter
By Naomi Nix, Jeremy B. Merrill and Joseph Menn
November 1, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
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Twitters takedown of the networks, which mostly operated between April and October, came during a stormy period for the social media giant as it prepared to be sold to billionaire Elon Musk and faced ongoing scrutiny over how it polices misinformation ahead of next weeks midterms, when political control of Congress is up for grabs.
The disclosure by Twitter adds to what is known about China-based efforts to influence American audiences by mimicking the strategies Russia-based operatives used to stoke cultural and political tensions during the 2016 election. In September, Meta announced it had disrupted a China-based operation seeking to influence U.S. politics. The U.S. government also has issued warnings about Chinese influence efforts, as have a spate of reports from cybersecurity firms including Googles Mandiant, Recorded Future and Alethea Group.
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 about the pandemic and coronavirus vaccines.
Alethea had concluded that Chinese-linked accounts on Twitter and elsewhere were pursuing divisiveness but plugging right-wing issues more than left, sometimes with nods to conspiracy theories. In the newly suspended batch, one account tweeted in May that former president Barack Obama was a lizard person who is a member of the Illuminati, according to copy of the tweet archived by the Internet Archive.
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