China’s Social Media Campaign to Divide Hong Kong Should Worry Us All
Facebook and Twitter have made progress since 2016, but attackers still have the advantage
One Facebook post showed a photo of Hong Kong protesters, their bodies overlaid with the carapaces of human-sized cockroaches. Another compared the demonstrators to ISIS terrorists. A tweet asked whether the protesters — who have been marching in the hundreds of thousands over the past couple months — were “crazy” or “taking benefits from the bad guys” and said they had no place in Hong Kong.
These posts were part of what Facebook and Twitter are calling a widespread, coordinated information campaign with links to the Chinese government. On Monday, the two social media companies disclosed evidence of the campaign in separate announcements, after working together to uncover it. (Twitter found it first and tipped off Facebook, according to Facebook’s release.)
This is the first time the companies have publicly accused Beijing of using social media to spread disinformation in Hong Kong, which is a part of China but governed separately from the rest of the country. However, it certainly isn’t the first time a national government has used U.S.-based social media to covertly influence politics. And it should serve as a warning that a…
