Given Twitter's role in fomenting regime change in the Middle East a few years ago (with tragic, or no results) it is heartening to see the tables being turned. Glad to see the Chinese are wising up to our tricks.

The CPC-run PRC is on the Nazi road. It is totalitarian. Admires Carl Schmitt, Adolph's favorite jurist, and is building camps. As a political gang, it does an okay job on poverty reduction and infrastructure building but any government that disappears people is just another criminal gang and now it has its Fuhrer err I mean "Chairman" for life Xi Jinping to worship. A prescription, over the long haul, for catastrophic failure.

I don't know why they even bother. The rioters are already shooting themselves in the foot. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Thank you NYT for a comprehensive examination of the subject especially over a number of years, locations and corporations. There is something inauthentic about the way people in cyberspace criticize the pro democracy movement in Hing Kong. But there are also examples of protest in Hong Kong against China that are also clumsy and inauthentic such as the use of US flags in Hong Kong and Chinese flags with swastikas on them. China is not a perfect socialist or democratic country and more akin to a modern version of an imperialist Chinese dynasty.

The CCP is definitely behind what it calls "large-scale overseas propaganda" starting from 2009 and costing 45 billion RMB. They spread disinformation to target overseas Chinese who can't read English and those in China who circumvent the Great Fire Wall to obtain information. After all, most Chinese in their 50s and above don't have good command of English. They do it in other languages to target local people. I've seen those vilifying HKers in Thai, Korean, Japanese, Spanish and of course English. The contents are highly identical because the CCP either use bots to spread the same message or hire humans to spread previously written slogans. When they are confronted, these trolls always verbally abuse their rivals. The CCP's propaganda scheme, no matter how much money they sink, is doomed because in the free world with information freely flowing, lies and manipulation cannot take hold. It only reveals to the entire world the Fascist and stupid side of the CCP regime.

What is the point of spreading Twitter rumors in Chinese? It only affect those who understand Chinese. Why is that a big deal if it is not internationalized enough to be understood by most of the people on Twitter?

Disinformation and propaganda are as old as human civilization. The techniques were documented in "The art of war" by Sun Tzu in 500 BCE. The ancient Egyptian Pharaoh elected huge obelisk in honoring the victory over Hilti in a battle in which they lost. Randolph Hearst employed false information to start the war with Spain and this disinformation had also employed to demonize America India to win American West expansion, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. After WWII following the example of Nazi Germany, this propaganda machine became part of CIA and LED of the state department. These type of disinformation have been used to start a coup and regime change in South America, Mid-East, China, West Europe and etc. The subterfuge and deception are fair games for both the US and China to continue battling it out in a proxy war in HK and I wish NYT would have reported the role played by CIA in this game of chicken in a more even-handed manner other than serving a messager of the US’s foreign policy goal.

In this article the quote by Matt Schrader...“The end goal is to control the conversation”...sounds a lot like Don Draper in MAD MEN (Season 3, Episode 2): "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." Cite: Mad Men - Change the conversation https://youtu.be/su56rdSvQBU

Who do you think they learned from? who is behind "the Arab Spring" ? Google directed by CIA. LOL

Reporting this like this is important and it needs to be broadcasted to counteract China's disinfo campaign. Simply making people aware that it's going on and providing evidence like this article does that it is both real and easy to spot once you know it's happening, should help people become more credulous. A simple rule of propaganda is continuous reinforcement of the false narrative from as many vectors as possible. Uncritical, low information people follow the general consensus without really caring what that consensus is. You can counterfeit a consensus by simply drowning out all other voices with continuous messaging for your narrative, so that it appears to come from everywhere. It doesn't "radicalize" the low information people, nor does it convert them into agents, it just immunizes them against the counter message by making them accept the false narrative as the new normal, this will bias them against anything that runs counter to it and which has far less ubiquity. What China is doing is a brute force approach. It's not subtle, but it doesn't need to be. It's similar to astroturfing, mean to create an illusion of popular support from the general public to bias people's attitudes toward new information. It can be fought against, by shutting down their means of spreading disinfo, and by aggressively counter-messaging.

Mainstream media have been promoting a "Chinese bots" narrative for years, but researchers have been finding the opposite to be true, that pervasive botnets regarding Chinese news events are almost all operated by the U.S. This paper including some findings: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1476576, of which I share two excerpts: 1. "However, contrary to expectations and previous news reports, no evidence was found of pro-Chinese-state automation on Twitter." 2. "Automation on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic Chinese and mainland users who ‘jump the wall’ to access blocked platforms"

Recently I deleted all my social media accounts I used sporadically anyway. I didn't want to get upset with all the faked news and trolls anymore. But I have to wonder out loud why FB, Twitter , YouTube etc.,spending their analysts time for non revenue items? Certainly it didn't seem to be some haphazard activities, i.e,I am sure spikes happened after mass gun violence too, and no stats?

China's controlling Communist Party is like a porcelain cup...strong, hard, inflexible, and brittle. When presented with a shock, they are well aware the cup may shatter. Beijing has not honored their commitment to universal suffrage as enshrined in the Basic Law which was agreed with the UK. Legitimate concerns about governance voiced by people were ignored. Governmental unresponsiveness compounded the problem, driving the Hong Kong protests. Beijing was caught flat footed by the depth of people's aggrievement. Beijing systematically controls all media inside of China, behind their Great Firewall. But for Beijing to actively utilize tools forbidden to ordinary Chinese, to work to manipulate social media outside of China, this shows their underlying anxiety. The nightmare for China's totalitarian leadership is that people inside China might learn to demand accountability from their own leaders. When 2 million Hong Kongers peacefully march and chant "Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times" and "Five Demands, Not One Less", this simple act causes alarm and fear in Beijing.

This is the type of reporting we need more of. Great data and great visuals. Keep up the good work NYT!

Recall the atheist Communist regime's slaughter of over 100,000,000 Chinese persons during the mao tse tung era. And, for what? A social utopia? Yet, 'the cobwebs and clatterings' of Chinese propoganda persist; 'cold and without virtue.' Two million Chinese employed to spray our world with dogma, neither tried nor harmonized by the utilitarian measure? The propogandist's imposters' ends and purposes stated succintly: to destabilize hence weaken us by inculcating a general malaise and state of confusion -that we may be more easily controlled. The Book of Jeremiah suggests we "stand in the ancient ways, but look also unto a present experience to see whether in the light of this experience, ancient ways are right: If they are found to be so, walk in them." 'The Instauratio Magna' written by Francis Bacon in the early sixteen hundreds cautions against those who " make passage for themselves and their own opinions by pulling down and demolishing former ones; and yet all their stir has but little advanced the matter; since their aim has been only to change doctrines and transfer the kingdom of opinions to themselves; whereby little has indeed been gained for, though the error be the opposite of the other, the causes of error are the same in both." I am reminded that those who " deny a GOD destroy man's nobility for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and, if he not be of kin to GOD by his spirit, he is a base and ingnoble creature" And all time has wept.

Twitter is for useless musings. Anyone actually “influenced” by what gets posted on Twitter doesn’t have a brain in their head. Ditto for those who get worked up over it. The biggest danger for society are the number of people that fall into the above categories.

In 2013, the head of China’s propaganda department said that in Beijing alone, there were more than 2 million people working to “strengthen guidance of online opinion,” including by posting comments on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform.... “What works inside China doesn’t work internationally,” she said. “I think China is probably working through that now.” I am so grateful that our elections have been so thoroughly protected by legislation passed by the House and Senate and that there'll be ZERO interference in 2020. s/

I’m those who your article claim as suspicious twitter user. I had Twitter account when I was in college, at that time I barely use it, after tumblr sexual content banned, I use that account to watch porngraphic. When Hong Kong Riot happened this June, I start use that account to follow the News. I assume there have a lot of people do the same things. There have a lot of people use Twitter for Porngraphic including young people.

On one hand, I am very opposed to China's elaborate attempts at influencing perceptions towards Hong Kong's current state of affairs and discrediting protesters. It is as though, they want to create a new truth through constant repetition. On the other hand, one must be conscious that China is hardly alone in employing this strategy. I mean, the US has also resorted to disinformation campaigns in many countries. In 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaegh was toppled in a CIA coup. As part of a prior disinformation campaign, the CIA had printed leaflets (in Farsi) alleging Mossadegh was actually a communist. Whoever in the CIA thought up this idea must have been cunning: at the time, Iran had a communist insurgency raging in its north, and so, implying an association between Mossadegh and the communists served to discredit him. It also reminds me of the McCarthy-era trials in the US where a false list of communist sympathisers was produced before the US Congress, discrediting many innocent people. There you have it. China did not invent this strategy, and is certainly not the only entity to employ it. Its creeping, subversive methods in Hong Kong are still wrong though. At least in China's it is still doing it in a Chinese territory (Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region). But the US employed such tactics in foreign countries, which meant it undermined their national sovereignty.

It worked in America, so why not?

"Samm Sacks, a China expert at New America, a Washington-based think tank, said the clumsiness of the Twitter operations showed that China was still 'out of its depth in trying to shape the international narrative.'" Are you joking? The technical innovations China pioneered to use the Internet to manipulate and control its citizens are so state-of-the-art that they are coveted by Western governments everywhere. While the Russians are the "technicians" of Internet oppression, the Chinese are it's true pioneers. They took a technology that everyone thought would liberate truth everywhere into an iron jackboot. Citizens of China police each other now, making wholesale "re-education" and political imprisonment less necessary. Trump's campaign Consigliere Brad Parscale stole most of what he knows from the Chinese. If you want to see the future of Surveillance Capitalism, US election manipulation, and consumer manipulation just look to the Peoples Republic of China.

The early developers anticipated that the internet would be a powerful force for democracy, a way to let everyone's voice be heard. The sad reality has proven to be that the internet is a very effective way for the most powerful to control public perceptions and so strengthen their hold. By outspending everyone else as China has done here, public dialogue ends up being crushed by carefully orchestrated campaigns. Nowhere was it guaranteed that technology will be good for democracy. In this instance, it has turned out to be the enemy.

And what twerking teen wouldn't support a repressive police state? Sounds genuine to me!

Americans, and all other true democracies (mainly Canada, EU & some S. American states) must aggressively support and protect our 1st amendment rights (or equivalents), our professional journalists & ‘real’ news institutions. Without these, our democracies cease to function. Trump relentlessly threatens American democracy to its core, and must be stopped now, and the damage undone.