China’s Inauthentic UK Twitter Diplomacy: A Coordinated Network Amplifying PRC Diplomats

Overview

In this report, we identify a coordinated network of accounts amplifying the People’s Republic of China’s diplomats stationed in the UK. Based on an analysis of all retweet and reply engagement with the PRC’s diplomats in the UK between June 2020 and January 2021, we present the following findings: 

1. We identify 62 accounts that show strong signs of coordination. These accounts amplify the messages from UK-based PRC diplomats at a high rate, often hundreds or thousands of times within just a few months. 33 accounts had already been suspended or deleted by the time we concluded our investigation, and the remaining 29 were suspended for platform manipulation after we shared them with Twitter. 
2. The accounts in the network exhibits multiple forms of coordination, including account creation, long-term activity, co-amplification of PRC diplomats within just seconds of each other, and distinct overlapping language patterns. In several cases, accounts could be traced back to likely a single human operator switching between multiple accounts in sequence. 
3. This coordinated information operation drives a significant proportion of the engagement with the PRC’s UK public diplomacy on Twitter. Over the eight month period, 44% of the ambassador’s retweets and 20% of his replies came from the coordinated network of 62 accounts  

The R and Python code used to conduct the analysis and replication materials

Marcel Schliebs, Hannah Bailey, Jonathan Bright & Philip N. Howard. “China’s Inauthentic UK Twitter Diplomacy: A Coordinated Network Amplifying PRC Diplomats.” (2021). Oxford, UK: Programme on Democracy & Technology. demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk

Together with this report, we are also publishing a broader study auditing global online public diplomacy campaigns carried out by PRC diplomats.  The report ‘China’s Public Diplomacy Operations – Understanding engagement and inauthentic amplification of Chinese diplomats on Facebook and Twitter’ highlights how the PRC uses Twitter and Facebook to strategically amplify the PRC’s narratives.   

Read the report “China’s Public Diplomacy Operations – Understanding engagement and inauthentic amplification of Chinese diplomats on Facebook and Twitter”