Here’s a quick sample of the @ctcc507 tweets that the other troll accounts retweeted:



'RT @ctcc507: The legislative council belongs to the people of Hong Kong.Those people with ulterior motives indicated by forces hide behind…',

'RT @ctcc507: The legislative council belongs to the people of Hong Kong.Those people with ulterior motives indicated by forces hide behind…',

'RT @ctcc507: Governing Hong Kong by law is the core value of Hong Kong. We don’t allow anyone to run roughshod over the law.

'RT @ctcc507: Governing Hong Kong by law is the core value of Hong Kong. We don’t allow anyone to run roughshod over the law. RT @ctcc507: Governing Hong Kong by law is the core value of Hong Kong. We don’t allow anyone to run roughshod over the law. https://t.co/P…', 'RT @ctcc507: The legislative council belongs to the people of Hong Kong.Those people with ulterior motives indicated by forces hide behind…','RT @ctcc507: The legislative council belongs to the people of Hong Kong.Those people with ulterior motives indicated by forces hide behind…','RT @ctcc507: Governing Hong Kong by law is the core value of Hong Kong. We don’t allow anyone to run roughshod over the law. https://t.co/P…', 'RT @ctcc507: Governing Hong Kong by law is the core value of Hong Kong. We don’t allow anyone to run roughshod over the law. https://t.co/P…'],

@ctcc507 was retweeted 465 times in this small subset alone. The sample above leaves no doubt as to the messages the troll accounts were trying to push. Elsewhere in the retweets, we see the trolls continue to promote the conspiracy theory about foreign intervention in the HK protests (several variations of ‘ulterior motives’ ranked near the top).

To deal with the far larger body of text in the Chinese tweets, I focused only on the tweets in July. The Chinese tweets that month was however the largest chunk by far during the surge period, and consisted of about 35,000 tweets. And like in the case of the English troll content, retweets made up the bulk of Chinese language troll tweets.

Top terms in Chinese “original” tweets:

反 對 314

社 會 277

對 派 248

反 對 派 248

瘟 龟 215

行 為 191

瘟 鬼 183

破 壞 178

香港 嘅 160

穩 定 158

香港 法治 151

佢 哋 148

严惩 暴徒 131

香港 警察 126

遊 行 120

嚴 懲 117

一定 要 116

應 該 114

维护 香港 108

勢 力 105

嘅 行 104

香港 和平 103

中 國 102

Top terms in Chinese retweets:

逃犯 条例 8182

香港 逃犯 7951

香港 逃犯 条例 7299

逃犯 条例 游行 6132

条例 游行 6132

香港 逃犯 条例 游行 5695

護 香港 4751

遊 行 4535

社 會 4257

反 對 4131

游行 暴徒 3885

守 護 3738

逃犯 条例 游行 暴徒 3354

条例 游行 暴徒 3354

反 對 派 3153

對 派 3153

守 護 香港 3011

What I’ve noticed from the term frequency counts above and a weekend of looking through the tweets is the higher usage of terms condemning the protestors who turned violent. The term 暴徒 (violent thugs) and the call to punish the violent protestors (严惩 暴徒) came up more prominently in the second tranche of tweets, compared to the first.

But a fuller content analysis is needed to confirm if this indeed reflected a change in “narrative” focus in the disinformation campaign.

SCATTERTEXT PLOTS

I had previously used Scattertext plots to visualise the first tranche of Chinese state troll tweets. The visual value of such plots isn’t that high a second time round, I feel, but I kept the plots in the notebook for the useful search function at the bottom left corner of the plots.

If you download the html files, you can use use the search box to easily find tweets and retweets associated with the desired search terms, such as “ulterior motives”. This could be valuable for future research.