Upon further investigation, we noticed that these #USAVirus tweets shared similar features and used the same information tactic: in addition to the hashtag and English tweet text, many of these tweets came along with a text-image that was composed of a lengthy essay in simplified Chinese and a few images (see Fig.
China state media mocks us archive#
Third, many #USAVirus tweets were listed in Twitter's removal archive on June 12, which included Chinese-related information operations. Compared with other forms of propaganda, who would gain or loss by this hashtag is relatively clear. Second, #USAVirus is literally a direct accusation to a clear target-United State. First, the hashtag directly echoes Zhao’s conspiracy theory, alluding the possibility of coordination. This hashtag drew our special attention for three reasons. One month after Zhao’s tweet, a sudden wave of #USAVirus started to spread on Twitter. Meanwhile, a recent study finds evidence linking tweet bots to a Beijing-based market company, which has contracted with the Chinese government to “deliver to the world the correct voice of China” amid the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, this conspiracy theory was endorsed and tweeted by Zhao Lijian, the spokesman and deputy director-general of the Information Department of China’s Foreign Ministry. On February 22, 2020, Chinese official media Global Times publicly suggested that the COVID-19 virus might originate in the USA. Our result suggests the necessity of extracting and analyzing the content in the attached text-image. The prevalence of simplified Chinese text-images in the #USAVirus trend and their impact on Twitter account suspensions both evidence the importance of text-image in the study of state-led propaganda. The importance outweighs the number of followers, engagement, and the text content of the tweet. All models suggest that the inclusion of a text-image is the most important predictor. We apply the decision tree, random forest, and logit regression to explain the suspensions. Our dataset enables us to analyze why and why not Twitter suspends certain accounts. Overall, 475 (37.8%) accounts we traced were later suspended after Twitter’s disclosure. Distribution of the post-creation time fits the working-hour in China. The 3567 tweets with #USAVirus we collected, albeit many written in English, 74% of them attached with a lengthy simplified Chinese text-image. In this article, we traced 1256 Twitter accounts echoing China government’s #USAVirus propaganda before and after Twitter removed state-linked operations on June 12, 2020. The literature on China’s social media foreign propaganda mostly focuses on text-format contents in English, which may miss the real target and the tool for analysis.
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