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.
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