On August 19, Twitter released an archive of 936 accounts it attributed to a “significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong.” The accounts violated the platform’s manipulation policies, which prohibit spam, coordinated activity, fake accounts, attributed activity, and ban evasion.

In its statement, Twitter said:

The accounts we are sharing today represent the most active portions of this campaign; a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000 accounts — many created following our initial suspensions — were proactively suspended before they were substantially active on the service.

It also noted that some of the accounts had IP addresses originating in mainland China:

As Twitter is blocked in PRC, many of these accounts accessed Twitter using VPNs. However, some accounts accessed Twitter from specific unblocked IP addresses originating in mainland China.

The DFRLab’s analysis revealed that many of the accounts in Twitter’s archive also used tactics similar to that of a commercial bot network. In particular, some of the automated accounts deployed to target the Hong Kong protests had a history of use for commercial purposes, such as posting spam-like promotional links in high volume.

Analyses of Chinese online propaganda efforts to date have mostly focused on the Communist Party’s use of a human-run, nationalist troll army, often called wumao, or the “50 cents.” The DFRLab’s analysis of this archive, however, concentrates on the use of commercial bot accounts originating within mainland China, which has been less well-studied.

Targeting the Hong Kong Protests

A tweet by one of these commercial-origin accounts, for example, invoked the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance (FOO), a controversial amendment to Hong Kong’s extradition legislation that would allow extradition of fugitives from Hong Kong to mainland China, Macau, and Taiwan. The proposed amendment was the initial catalyst for the current protests, as pro-democracy activists worried that officials could wield it to silence the Chinese government’s critics in Hong Kong. While Hong Kong officials suspended the amendment in June, when the protests first began, they have not officially withdrawn it, which remains one of the protestors’ five chief demands.

The tweet emphasized that Hong Kong natives, along with “anti-China forces” such as the United States, had unnecessarily politicized the proposed extradition amendment.