Pakistanis behind ‘Chinese’
info
war on border standoff
Handles with Chinese names, Mandarin content traced to earlier avatars in Urdu
Many of the ‘Chinese’ accounts that mushroomed on
social media this summer
and spread false information
about the border clash with
India have been traced to Pakistan, in what is believed to
be a coordinated disinformation campaign aimed at
India.
The IndiaChina border
tensions starting in May, and
culminating in the June 15
clash in the Galwan Valley,
sparked a firstofitskind information war on social media, where Indian and Chinese accounts on Twitter,
Facebook and YouTube traded images and videos in an
effort to both capture the
narrative and the attention
of the media.
The disinformation
flowed both ways. But what
was unknown to consumers
of the posts by ‘Chinese’ social media users is that many
of the accounts that posed as
Chinabased users were actually Pakistani accounts.
Twitter is banned in China,
although it can be accessed
using virtual private
networks.
An analysis of some of the
most active ‘Chinese accounts’ on the border clash
on Twitter found that these
accounts previously had different profile names and
handle names. Some of
these accounts even had user bios that were earlier in
Urdu, before morphing overnight into Mandarin.
One such account, ‘xiuying637’, was earlier run as
‘hinaarbi2’, before it began
tweeting information related
to the Chinese military and
the border clash. The account has been suspended,
but only belatedly.
These accounts have used
a loophole on Twitter that allows users to not only
change their profile names,
but their Twitter handles as
well. Their changed avatars
were detected because some
of these accounts, which
have tens of thousands of followers, were previously being tracked.
One account, with a profile name in Chinese characters, Zeping, and handle ‘sawaxpx’, that tweeted on the
border previously tweeted in
Urdu. Its tweets are now unavailable. Another account,
‘Yasifxi’, had a Chinese
name and tweeted in Chinese characters, posting information about the border
clash, but was traced to
Pakistan.
These accounts have
shared false information
about casualties from the
clash, unrelated images of injured soldiers, and videos of
troops’ confrontations that
were from previous border
incidents. Tweeting in Mandarin and using Chinese
names gave the posts a sense
of credibility
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