The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays a major role in manipulating the information spaces and media of other countries across the globe, according to a report.
The CCP is known to employ immoral and despicable means and tools to secure its unethical objectives. However, due to the insufficiency of evidence, it was not possible to prove that China-based forces were indulging in disinformation campaigns across the world. Things have taken a shift now owing to large scale investigations, reported the Hong Kong Post.
Russia was once involved in an aggressive disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 US elections. China is on a similar foot for the past many years. However, investigations and takedowns of fake accounts helped uncover the real picture, reported the Hong Kong Post.
Now there is evidence that pro-China forces have actively been carrying out a range of manipulative operations on global social media platforms, ensuring maximum efficacy.
Multiple investigations on the same issue show that there is an enormous number of operations and activities pointing to crucial repercussions in world politics, global search results and mobile phone users across the world, reported the Hong Kong Post.
According to a study in May by the Oxford Internet Institute, UK mentioned that over 26,000 Twitter accounts were involved in ramping up the posts uploaded by the Chinese diplomats or state media. The amplification activity was done almost 2,00,000 times. Later, the accounts were suspended for content manipulation.
The said Twitter accounts were in multiple languages. In the UK, a large proportion of re-tweets of tweets by then-Ambassador Liu Xiaoming came from fake accounts which were later suspended by Twitter, reported the Hong Kong Post.
As Google's quarterly reports on YouTube takedowns suggest that over 10,570 YouTube channels were suspended and taken down. The said channels were involved in engaging in coordinated influence operations linked to China between January and September his year. For Chinese propagandists, YouTube seems to be the platform of their choice.
As per the investigation conducted by ProPublica, a US-based non-profit organization that produces investigative journalism, hundreds of videos of Uyghurs claimed that they "had seen statements made by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about severe rights violations in Xinjiang, but that it is all nonsense," reported the Hong Kong Post.
All these activities showcase how China-linked producers alter and renew propaganda content from time to time, despite the removal of unauthentic accounts. The propagandists add fake public support to Chinese diplomatic statements and effectively distort platform algorithms, and hence expose more genuine users to Chinese government propaganda, reported the Hong Kong Post.
( With inputs from ANI )
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