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SYDNEY: A Chinese official’s tweet of an image of an Australian soldier that sparked a furious reaction in Canberra was amplified on social media by unusual accounts, half of which were likely fake, an Israeli cybersecurity firm and Australian experts said .
The digitally altered image of an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the throat of an Afghan boy was tweeted by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Monday (November 30).
Twitter rejected Australia’s request to remove the tweet.
The Chinese embassy in Canberra told ABC television on Friday that 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 it found evidence of an orchestrated campaign to promote Zhao’s tweet.
Cyabra said it found that 57.5 percent of the accounts that interacted with Zhao’s tweet were false and “evidence of a largely orchestrated disinformation campaign” to amplify his message.
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The firm did not provide details on who was behind the campaign.
Cyabra said it analyzed 1,344 profiles and found that a large number were created in November and used once to retweet Zhao’s tweet.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tim Graham of Queensland University of Technology analyzed 10,000 responses to Zhao’s tweet.
China-originated accounts were the most active, he said, and 8 percent of responses were from accounts created the day or in the previous 24 hours. Many contained duplicate text.
“When they don’t tweet about Afghan children, they tweet about Hong Kong,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“If there are enough of them, those irregularities suggest they were created for a particular campaign.”
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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 Institute for Strategic Policy, said she had also noticed “unusual behavior” on Twitter accounts by retweeting or liking Zhao’s tweet.
“There was an increase in accounts created on November 30 and December 1,” he told Reuters, 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, in addition to one or two other accounts, he said. A third of the accounts that liked Zhao’s tweet had no followers, ASPI noted.
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 the company remains vigilant, but that Cyabra’s findings “do not stand up to scrutiny” because they were based only on publicly available data.
A Cyabra spokeswoman said its founders are information warfare experts with Israeli military backgrounds and that the US State Department was among their clients.
