Chinese propaganda tweets blame virus on US lobsters

A NETWORK of Twitter accounts linked to China has claimed that Covid19 was imported to the Wuhan seafood market via a shipment of Maine lobster from the US, a disinformation researcher has discovered.

The theory is the latest to emerge from Beijing in an effort to deflect and obfuscate any investigation into the virus’s true origin.

Zha Liyou, the Chinese consul general based in Kolkata, India, was the first to tweet the claim in mid-september. It was then disseminated through Twitter in several languages, including English, Spanish, French, Korean and Latin.

Marcel Schliebs, a researcher in disinformation at Oxford University, said he had uncovered over 550 accounts which shared the theory using near identical wording. He said all the accounts would post messages at similar times each day between 8am and 11am Beijing time.

“Attribution is really difficult,” Mr Schliebs told NBC News. “But we can see there’s a coordinated effort, and that it’s a pro-chinese narrative.”

Mr Schliebs said he was able to uncover the network after noticing that some of the accounts were “unsophisticated sock puppets” with “very few or zero followers”, while others appeared to be legitimate accounts that had been hacked for the purpose of spreading disinformation.

“It looks crude when you look at individual accounts. But these kinds of networks are designed to try and get topics to trend on social media,” said Bret Schafer, the head of the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a US campaigning organisation.

Mr Schliebs passed his findings to Twitter, which said it had suspended many of the accounts. Beijing has variously claimed that Covid originally leaked from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and that the virus originally arrived from Russia via rail cargo.