Genocide denial and spam

Over the last several years, evidence of large-scale ongoing human rights abuses committed by the Chinese government against Uyghurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang has surfaced with increasing frequency. These abuses, which include mass detention, forced labor, parent/child separation, and forced sterilization, are commonly referred to as the Uyghur Genocide. Chinese officials have repeatedly denied that any of the reported abuses are taking place (even when presented with video), and a variety of social media campaigns have sprung up to echo those denials. On Twitter, this has often involved spam networks composed of similar-looking accounts tweeting identical tweets about Xinjiang.an example of Xinjiang-related spam — 32 identical tweets from 12 accountsSince late 2020, @ZellaQuixote and I have been tracking (some of) these spam networks. They aren’t hard to find — running a Twitter search for “Xinjiang” and looking for repeated tweets and unusual patterns in account creation dates will frequently reveal them. Twitter generally bans them sooner or later, but replacements quickly emerge.A list of the Xinjiang-related spam networks we’ve studied, in more or less chronological order:Two groups of inauthentic accounts (7258 accounts created in late 2019/early 2020 and 76 accounts created in late 2020) retweeting a Global Times article denying the existence of detention camps in Xinjiang 674 inauthentic accounts retweeting content about Xinjiang from Chinese government officials and state-affiliated media accounts in late 2020/early 2021479 inauthentic accounts sharing a story about an arm reattachment surgery performed at a Xinjiang hospital in a variety of languages in May…Genocide denial and spam

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