WSJ "Pro-China Twitter Accounts Dominate Anti-BeijingOlympic Hashtags"

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, pro-China Twitter accounts have dominated hashtags criticizing China's human rights abuses against the Uyghur ethnic group, diluting Western criticism. It has been pointed out that these accounts have employed an online tactic of posting unrelated content under the hashtags to prevent critics from rallying online and to cause the hashtags to be perceived as spam, thereby neutralizing their impact.

On the 8th (local time), The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing analysis from the Media Forensic Hub at Clemson University, that over 132,000 tweets using the hashtag '#GenocideGames' were posted between October 20 last year and January 20 this year. This hashtag, combining 'genocide'?meaning ethnic cleansing?and 'games' referring to the Winter Olympics, was used by human rights activists and Western politicians to raise awareness about human rights issues in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region during the Winter Olympics.

According to the report, from late October last year, automatically generated accounts on Twitter began posting large volumes of spam content unrelated to the Xinjiang human rights issue using this hashtag. Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University analyzed that such activity appears intended to dilute the effect of the hashtag in creating online solidarity. WSJ calls this method 'hashtag flooding,' explaining that this strategy causes social media users to see only unrelated content, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the hashtag campaign.

Additionally, it is analyzed that there was an intention to make Twitter's monitoring system recognize this hashtag as spam, leading to the deletion of all related posts. In fact, during the period investigated by Clemson University, 67% of tweets with this hashtag were deleted according to Twitter's spam-related policies. The posts were found to cover topics unrelated to the Xinjiang Uyghur issue, such as romance and the NFL (National Football League).

The Clemson research team also pointed out that about one in ten tracked accounts used this hashtag from their very first tweet after creation. Professor Linvill explained that this characteristic suggests these accounts were specifically created from the start for the hashtag flooding operation.

Twitter stated to WSJ that it first identified a series of accounts believed to be sponsored by China in December last year. WSJ added that the accounts involved in this hashtag operation mostly used names that appeared unrelated to China, such as 'Erin Rocket' and 'Isaac Churchill.'

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.