WSJ: China’s Propaganda Army Flooded Twitter’s ‘#GenocideGames’ to Drown Out Olympics Criticism

A recent report by the Wall Street Journal states that researchers believe that China’s social media propaganda army has been flooding Twitter to manipulate the #GenocideGames hashtag relating to the Winter Olympics being hosted in the communist country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that researchers believe that pro-China accounts are attempting to manipulate the #GenocideGames hashtag on Twitter to confuse those using the hashtag and make it harder for activists to effectively utilize it. The hashtag has been used by human-rights advocates and Western lawmakers to raise awareness about the Xinjiang region of China where authorities have been conducting forced assimilation efforts on religious minorities like Ughyur Muslims.

Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, professors at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub note that in late October, pro-China accounts began to post spam-like content under the hashtag. The researchers believe that this is an effort to make it harder for activists to mobilize around the hashtag. This tactic is known as “hashtag flooding” and its primary aim is to dilute the effectiveness of a popular hashtag so that Twitter users looking for the term see unrelated content mixed in with actual announcements and information.

Linvill stated: “The Chinese propaganda apparatus has been very focused on defending their image regarding the treatment of the Uyghur, while also promoting the Olympics. This hashtag is at the nexus of those two things.” While the pro-China accounts are making it harder for human-rights advocates to find important content, another aim of hashtag flooding is to have Twitter’s monitoring system mark the hashtag as spam in an effort to have Twitter remove content relating to the hashtag.

Linvill and Warren state that there have been more than 132,000 tweets posted from October 20 through January 20 that used the hashtag #GenocideGames. Around 67 percent of the tweets are no longer viewable; a Twitter spokesperson said that action was taken on some of these tweets in line with the company’s rules relating to spam and platform manipulation.

The spokesperson also added that the accounts were part of China-backed disinformation network identified by Twitter in December.

In the past, Twitter has done little to stop China’s social media propaganda war. Breitbart News has reported in the past on Liu Xiaoming, one of the leaders of China’s social media push.

Liu has managed to gain a following of more than 119,000 users as he has become the role model for China’s new sharp-edged “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a popular Chinese action movie.

Liu, who now works as China’s Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, tweeted in February: “As I see it, there are so-called ‘wolf warriors’ because there are ‘wolfs’ in the world and you need warriors to fight them.”

His posts, which largely consist of harsh retorts to Western anti-Chinese bias, have been retweeted more than 43,000 times from June through February alone. But according to AP News, much of the support that Liu and his colleagues receive may be manufactured.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com