Pro-China Twitter bots flood #GenocideGames hashtag with junk

Pro-China accounts have been flooding Twitter with messages using a popular hashtag critical of the 2022 Beijing Olympics to dilute its power to rally critics of host’s human rights abuses, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The hashtag #GenocideGames has been used by human rights advocates and others critical of the ruling Communist Party to raise awareness of its forced detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjian province.

However, researchers noticed that automated accounts appear to be spamming the hashtag with unrelated content, like sports or romance.

The tactic, known as “hashtag flooding,” is intended to make it more difficult for those searching the hashtag to find relevant content, reducing its effectiveness as a rallying point, said Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, professors at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Lab.

“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,” Linvell told the WSJ.

The researchers said flooding a hashtag can also get it marked as spam, which would get all tagged tweets deleted.

One in 10 of the accounts tracked by Linvell and Warren use #GenocideGames in the first tweet of its existence, and 70% had zero followers. They also noted many fake accounts used Western names, like “Erin Lockett” and “Isaac Churchill,” to give the impression activists were largely non-Asian.

Experts say social media manipulation is a common tactic of Chinese authorities, the target shifting with current events.

“Topics change according to what is of interest in the news: Hong Kong protests, the election in Taiwan in 2020, Covid, Xinjiang, now—per this research—the Olympics,” Renee DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, told the Journal.

Of the 132,000 tweets posted from Oct. 20 through Jan. 20 using #GenocideGames, 67% are no longer viewable. A Twitter spokeswoman told WSJ the company had taken action on some of the tweets according to its policies against spam and platform manipulation.