170,000 Twitter Accounts Deleted For Spreading Content Favorable To China

Hanima Anand |Jun 12, 2020

The social networking site has removed 1.7 lakh users who shared favorable content to Chinese government posted by core accounts. Most tweets are in Chinese language.

The announcement made by Twitter on Thursday didn’t cause much surprise to the world when there are identified over 23,750 core accounts posting favorable content to Chinese government and more than 150,000 users actively spread this content. The company has decided to have 170,000 Twitter accounts deleted in total in an attempt to remove misleading posts of geopolitical narratives.

In fact, Twitter, as well as other social networking sites, are blocked in China. However, many people in this country are able to access it by using a VPN.

Twitter Accounts Deleted 2 — Twitter decides to act, preventing Chinese government from manipulating its users.

Researcher and Twitter informed that many of these removed accounts were registered in January when the pandemic was declared present on the global scale. These users are especially active in sharing content related to Covid-19 or Hong Kong protests.

This movement is believed to be in Chinese plan to expand the influence of its communist party.

Twitter Accounts Deleted 1 — Twitter has many times removed geopolitical accounts on the platform.

Giving more details about the posts, Twitter said these narratives were posted by core users, praising the response to coronavirus by Chinese government while attacking US and Hong Kong activists with statistics of Covid-19.

These posts are later shared by a network of over 150,000 accounts to increase the coverage on this social medium. The total number of tweets from the core accounts go up to 348,608 times till date.

According to reports, this is not the first time Twitter removed accounts with political purposes. In August 2019, it has deleted roughly 1,000 accounts in China. More than 1,000 accounts related to the United Russian party and over 7,300 accounts promoting Turkish President are also deactivated in an attempt to keep Twitter an objective place.

Twitter Accounts Deleted 3 — Twitter used to label Trump's posts as glorifying violence or needing fact check.

Among all the social networking sites at the moment, Twitter appears to be a very straight-forward person who dares to take bold steps to remove misleading information.

Most recently, it labelled Donald Trump’s tweet with a fact-check tab when the US President is believed to have posted non-verified information as well as glorified violence. The President then signed a law which is considered not favorable to social media in general.