A Chinese official’s post on Twitter of an image of an Australian soldier that sparked a furious reaction from Canberra was amplified across social media by unusual accounts, of which half were likely fake, an Israeli cybersecurity firm and Australian experts said.
The digitally altered image of an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghan child was tweeted on Monday by Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅).
Twitter declined Australia’s request to remove the tweet.
The Chinese embassy in Canberra on Friday told ABC television that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s demand for an apology drew more attention to an investigation into war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Cyabra, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, said that it was highly probable that an orchestrated campaign had promoted Zhao’s tweet.
Cyabra said it had found 57.5 that of accounts that engaged with Zhao’s tweet were fake and “evidence of a largely orchestrated disinformation campaign” to amplify its message.
The firm did not give any details about who was behind the campaign.
Cyabra said it analyzed 1,344 profiles and found that a large number were created last month and used once, to retweet Zhao’s post.
China called Cyabra’s statement “unwarranted.”
“This is a classic example of spreading false information. Twitter has its own rules managing tweets,” the ministry said on Friday in response to questions from reporters.
The Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analyzed 10,000 replies to Zhao’s tweet.
Accounts originating in China were the most active and 8 percent of replies were from accounts created on the day, or in the 24 hours prior, Graham said.
Many contained duplicated text.
“When not tweeting about Afghan children, they were tweeting about Hong Kong,” he told reporters in an interview.
“If there’s enough of them, those irregularities suggest they were set up for a particular campaign,” he said.
Some of the accounts had already been identified by Graham in a dataset of 37,000 Chinese accounts targeting Australia since June, he said.
Ariel Bogle, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that she had also noticed “unusual behavior” by Twitter accounts retweeting or liking Zhao’s post.
“There was a spike in accounts created on November 30 and December 1,” Bogle told reporters, adding that it was too early to determine whether it was coordinated inauthentic behavior or patriotic individuals.
Many of the new accounts only followed Zhao, plus one or two other accounts, she said.
A third of accounts liking Zhao’s tweet had no followers, the institute said.
Earlier this year, Twitter said it had removed 23,750 accounts spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Chinese Communist Party and another 150,000 accounts designed to amplify these messages.
A Twitter spokeswoman said that the company remains vigilant, but the Cyabra findings “don’t hold up to scrutiny” because it relied only on publicly available data.
A Cyabra spokeswoman said that its founders are information warfare experts with Israeli military backgrounds and the US Department of State was among its clients.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
‘SHORTSIGHTED’: Using aid as leverage is punitive, would not be regarded well among Pacific Island nations and would further open the door for China, an academic said New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in budget funding to the Cook Islands, it said yesterday, as the relationship between the two constitutionally linked countries continues to deteriorate amid the island group’s deepening ties with China. A spokesperson for New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a statement that New Zealand early this month decided to suspend payment of NZ$18.2 million (US$11 million) in core sector support funding for this year and next year as it “relies on a high trust bilateral relationship.” New Zealand and Australia have become increasingly cautious about China’s growing presence in the Pacific
RSS