A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University in the United Kingdom revealed that diplomats, including former Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming, have a large number of “fake fans” who help them boost their popularity. The report noted that diplomats, including former Chinese Communist Party ambassador Liu Xiaoming, had a large number of “fake fans” who helped boost their popularity.
The report noted that from June last year to February this year, Liu Xiaoming, a former “war wolf” diplomat but former British ambassador who was caught up in the scandal of following pornographic Twitter numbers, tweeted 43,000 retweets of his mocking posts about the West. But investigators investigated in detail and found that more than half of the users who retweeted Liu’s articles between June last year and January this year were actually fake accounts, which were later deactivated by Twitter for violating platform rules.
In addition, from June to January, more than 50 percent of the retweets of diplomat posts from the Communist Party came from accounts in the 1 percent, which together made nearly 360,000 retweets, often with activity lasting only a few seconds.
After a batch of fake accounts were deleted, Twitter recently saw 1 more batch of fake accounts posing as British citizens who continued to promote content from the Chinese Communist government, and they had retweeted and replied to pro-CCP content more than 16,000 times before being deactivated late last month.
According to the Associated Press, this shows that the false popularity of Liu Xiaoming and other CCP ambassadors and officials comes from creating an illusion of massive support through a large online army of fake accounts. Some fake accounts retweeted the tweets of Chinese diplomats and official media tens of thousands of times, creating “support” for several diplomats, but the investigation report does not discuss whether the fake accounts received financial support from the Chinese government for their activities.
In addition, such fictitious responses can also distort the algorithms of social platforms, using them to expose messages to more users. Over time and scale, such networks will be able to distort the message ecosystem and deepen the influence of the CCP’s false messages.
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