An Epoch Times investigation exposed thousands of fake and malicious accounts that spread CCP propaganda, including via Western media.
Thousands of accounts with suspected links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been removed by social media platform X over the past month.
The accounts, which exhibited inauthentic activity, had been used to boost articles published by The New York Times that targeted a religious group persecuted in China.
One of the articles, a Chinese-language version of an attack piece on Shen Yun Performing Arts, was boosted so much it became the most shared New York Times article on X in more than a year, according to data from BuzzSumo, a social media analytics tool.
“It looks like a nation-state automated bot attack,” said Rex Lee, a cybersecurity expert at My Smart Privacy who has advised major corporations and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency.
Most of the accounts were taken down by X after The Epoch Times sent the platform the results of an extensive investigation into the issue. The platform then launched its own investigation.
“We take reports like these very seriously, and continue to action millions of accounts per week for platform manipulation and spam violations,” Dave Heinzinger, X’s head of media strategy, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
The Target
The New York Times over the past eight months has published 10 articles attacking Shen Yun. Eight of them were also published in the outlet’s Chinese-language edition. The articles were all heavily promoted on X by accounts that don’t appear to be authentic users.
Shen Yun is a New York-based performing arts company that showcases traditional Chinese culture as it existed before communism. The company was founded by practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that includes meditative exercises and teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The CCP sees Shen Yun, and Falun Gong more widely, as a threat because both make a point of exposing the regime’s human rights abuses.
The CCP has long been known to manipulate American social media, both through automated spam accounts and through deceptive “troll” or “shill” accounts.
By Petr Svab
