Twitter and Facebook have suspended numerous accounts that are believed to be tied to a state-backed information campaign originating from inside China.
Twitter said Monday it suspended 936 accounts that are thought to be related to the activity. The company said the disinformation campaign was designed to “sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political protest movement on the ground.”
“Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation,” the company said in a blog post. “Specifically, we have identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests.”
Facebook said in a post that a tip from Twitter led it to remove seven pages, three groups and five accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting Hong Kong.
“We’re taking down these Pages, Groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a post. “As with all of these takedowns, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”
Individuals involved in the campaign used fake accounts, some of which had been already spotted and disabled by Facebook’s automated systems, to manage pages posing as news sites, post in groups, share content and direct users to sites off of Facebook, the company said.
Shares of Twitter climbed more than 3% in afternoon trading. Facebook’s stock increased as much as 1.4%.
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