Twitter has disrupted three China-based operations that were covertly trying to influence American politics in the months leading up the midterm elections by amplifying politically polarizing topics, according to a trove of data released by the social media giant to researchers and The Washington Post.
The operations spanned nearly 2,000 user accounts, some of which purported to be located in the United States, and weighed in on a wide variety of hot-button issues, including election-rigging claims about the 2020 presidential election and criticism of members of the transgender community. Two of the three networks favored the U.S. right and one skewed left. At least some repeated pro-China narratives aimed at an American audience.
Twitter also took down three networks that were based in Iran but often claimed to be based in the United States or Israel, the data shows. At least one of the accounts involved in the Iranian efforts, 10Votes81, endorsed candidates even in local races. An account named 10Votes and using the same logo as an avatar was also active on YouTube, TikTok and especially Reddit, said Renée DiResta of Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, one of the data's recipients.
Twitter said in its disclosure to researchers that it was not attributing the activity to any specific governments. Twitter did not respond to a request for further comment. China's Embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Twitter's takedown of the networks, which mostly operated between April and October, came during a stormy period for the social media giant as it prepared to be sold to billionaire Elon Musk and faced ongoing scrutiny over how it polices misinformation ahead of next week's midterms, when political control of Congress is up for grabs.
Twitter and other tech platforms have struggled particularly to curb the spread of false claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election and to mitigate suggestions of fraud in the upcoming contests.
The disclosure by Twitter adds to what is known about China-based efforts to influence American audiences by mimicking the strategies Russia-based operatives used to stoke cultural and political tensions during the 2016 election. In September, Meta announced it had disrupted a China-based operation seeking to influence U.S. politics. The U.S. government also has issued warnings about Chinese influence efforts, as have a spate of reports from cybersecurity firms including Google's Mandiant, Recorded Future and Alethea Group.
Graham Brookie, head of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, which also received the data, said the tweets issued by the Chinese networks largely amplified ideas that originated with members of America's ideological extremes.
"This is equal opportunity hyper-partisanship, a tactic that's been more embraced by Russia," said Brookie, who added that the campaign was more assertive than past Chinese efforts. "It's the same theory of the case: A weakened adversary is one that allows you to shape geopolitics more."
One network that Twitter removed, the data showed, included 22 user accounts that tweeted more than 250,000 times. Between April and early October, their posts were generally pro-Trump and conspiratorial, particularly about the pandemic and coronavirus vaccines.
Alethea, another recipient of the data, concluded that Chinese-linked accounts on Twitter and elsewhere were pursuing divisiveness but plugging right-wing issues more than left, sometimes with nods to conspiracy theories. In the newly suspended batch, one account tweeted in May that former president Barack Obama was a "lizard person who is a member of the Illuminati," according to copy of the tweet archived by the Internet Archive.