Fake Twitter accounts uncovered, report says

BEIJING — A U.S.-based intelligence company says it uncovered a network of more than 600 inauthentic Twitter accounts that spread a positive narrative of China’s far-western Xinjiang region, as Beijing was being accused of human rights abuses and locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities there.

According to a report released Monday by Nisos, 648 Twitter accounts posted several thousand tweets with hashtags such as #xinjiang, #forcedlabor and #humanrights, with seemingly innocuous content such as traditional dancing and scenic photos, as well as videos with individuals denying that forced labor exists in Xinjiang.

The network and its tweets appear to be intended to promote “a positive narrative regarding Xinjiang and Uyghur treatment within the People’s Republic of China” and actively targeted a foreign audience, the report found.

The report comes as China is being criticized internationally for its treatment of Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group native to the Xinjiang region.

In recent years, China held hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in what Beijing calls “vocational education and training centers” but are widely believed by experts and academics to be internment camps.

China has also been accused of using forced labor in programs that transferred Uyghurs out of Xinjiang and assigned them to different factories throughout the country.

Nisos researchers did not reveal who was actually behind the network of inauthentic accounts.

But they said many of the accounts were created after August 2021, using stock images for their profile pictures, and the tweets were often posted within minutes of each other.