Fake Youth League accounts disappear
Net users show support to the league to protect its legitimate right by law
Some faked China Communist Youth League (CYL) Twitter accounts disappeared recently, after the CYL’s Central Committee announced last week that it had never even had an account on Twitter and vowed to take legal actions to protect its legitimate rights.
Several Twitter accounts claiming to be owned by the CYL and its affiliated bodies could not be found on Twitter on Tuesday. Since September, as many as 27 such accounts appeared on Twitter and the number is increasing, the Central Committee of the CYL said in a statement on its WeChat account Tuesday.
“The CYL and affiliated organizations have never opened any Twitter accounts,” the CYL Central Committee said in a separate statement published on its WeChat account on October 3, adding that those fake accounts impinge on CYL’s reputation and its legitimate rights.”
Many tweets on the fake accounts attack the Party and the government, or sneer at their patriotic behavior, or call for separatist activities, according to the Tuesday statement, which was later removed from the CYL’s account.
The CYL Central Committee said on October 3 that it had launched legal procedures to protect its rights, and asked Chinese Net users not to forward information from the fake accounts.
Twitter had no comment on the issue when the Global Times contacted it via email on Monday, and said only, “Twitter’s spokesperson does not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons.”
The counterfeits often use a profile page similar to that of the CYL Central Committee and imitate its way of talking. Some even synchronize their tweets with CYL content on its Sina Weibo and WeChat.
Many foreign Net users have been fooled by the ruse, the CYL Central Committee said in the Tuesday statement. To make matters worse, some mainstream media overseas have turned a deaf ear to CYL’s clarification.
The CYL is a youth organization under the Communist Party of China, which had more than 87 million members at the end of 2015.
The Weibo account of CYL Central Committee is now followed by more than 5 million Weibo users.
Many Net users have expressed their support for CYL on Chinese social media, encouraging it to further crack down on the fakes.
Some of those Twitter accounts were supported by hostile foreign groups, said Wang Sixin, a deputy dean of the Communication University of China’s School of Literature and Law.
China has achieved a lot since 1978 but there are still some people who resent China’s development or are dissatisfied with it, He Hui, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Because it’s a popular social media platform, they chose Twitter to spread false information about the government and the country and to make up stories to defame the country and people, He added.