Twitter disclosed on Thursday that China used nearly 200,000 fake accounts to boost Communist Party propaganda.
Russia, which played a central role in trying to influence the 2016 elections, waged similar campaigns using just under 1,200 state-linked accounts, according to Twitter, which said that Turkey also conducted similar campaigns.
China is by far the largest state-backed influencer on the website. Twitter said that it removed all of the accounts it found to be part of the Communist regime’s massive propaganda effort.
“Today we are disclosing 32,242 accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations—the only one of its kind in the industry,” Twitter reported on its official blog.
At least 23,750 of those accounts comprised the core of China’s propaganda network. Another 150,000 accounts were used to promote this propaganda across Twitter’s platform.
As for Russia, the accounts suspended by Twitter were found to have boosted “the United Russia party and [attacked] political dissidents.”
Another 7,340 were used by Turkey to promote positive information about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
