Twitter and TikTok in fake news firing line
China’s political manipulation of social media sites has prompted a swift response from the Morrison government.
In early 2019, a delegation of senior Australian government officials travelled to Shenzhen, China, where they were permitted into a gleaming, two-towered building in the city’s far west.
The futuristic glass-and-aluminium structure was the recently opened home of tech giant Tencent, the company behind the omnipresent Chinese social media platform WeChat.
Leading the delegation was Australia’s deputy electoral commissioner, Jeff Pope. He was accompanied by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade representatives, and other Australian government agency officials.
The meeting with Tencent’s general counsel and other members of the company’s legal team is believed to have been the first between a Western nation’s electoral authorities and the immensely powerful media company.
The AEC’s idea was to open the lines of communication with the social media player, recognising the platform as a potential conduit for disinformation ahead of the May 18, 2019 federal election.
“We pointed out what we thought their obligations were under Australian electoral laws,” AEC commissioner Tom Rogers tells The Australian.
Similar meetings took place in Silicon Valley with Twitter, Facebook and Google. But recognising WeChat’s two million-plus user base in Australia, the officials knew they could not ignore the Chinese social media platform.
Tencent was “receptive”, Rogers says, opening the way for a “collaborative relationship” during the 2019 campaign. It was, at least, the start of a dialogue.
University of Canberra research on WeChat news items before the election found they were biased against the Coalition. But on the whole, the 2019 poll was ruled by election officials to be free of detected foreign interference.
However, just over 12 months later, an explosion of fake news around the world and the rise of misinformation and foreign government interference across almost all the biggest social media platforms has infuriated the Morrison government, spurring a national, multi-agency response.
The problem is taking centre stage overseas in the lead-up to the US election in November, with Facebook under pressure to do more to combat extremist and fake posts, scrutiny of Twitter, and the rising influence of TikTok, a Chinese network initially made hugely popular by teenagers the world over. Australia has an eye to international developments.
Twitter has uncovered hundreds of thousands of tweets linked to Chinese disinformation campaigns, prompting the social media platform to remove more than 170,000 “bot” accounts.
The discovery made global headlines, and Twitter released an archive of 23,750 suspended accounts connected to Chinese state-backed information operations. A further 150,000 haven’t been released due to privacy reasons, as they are thought to be stolen or hacked legitimate accounts.
These accounts aimed to sow discord across several fronts — including propaganda against Hong Kong protesters who are portrayed repeatedly as violent and referred to as “cockroaches”, and in linking the COVID-19 outbreak to Hong Kong or the US.
“Eliminate the scum of Hong Kong … together with the virus, and return a bright tomorrow to Hong Kong,” one tweet reads. Other tweets take aim at exiled Chinese billionaire Gui Wengui.
Tweets from official sources were also shared or “amplified” by the bot accounts. One, from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, urged readers to read and retweet an article entitled “COVID-19: Further Evidence the Virus Originated in the US”.
Twitter is banned in China, but most of the misinformation is aimed at the Chinese-speaking diaspora, including in Australia.
Here, there are also worries that Chinese claims of Australian “racism” against its students and tourists are being perpetuated via WeChat.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne seized on Twitter’s comprehensive take-down of state-linked accounts in a speech this month to the ANU’s National Security College, in which she accused China and Russia of spreading disinformation during the pandemic to shore up their political systems.
“It is troubling that some countries are using the pandemic to undermine liberal democracy to promote their own more authoritarian models,” Payne said,
She also called out as disinformation China’s warnings to its students and tourists not to come to Australia because of racism, accusing Beijing of sowing “fear and division”.
Payne declared Australia would stand against the use of false information “to foment violence and divide communities”, and would counter it with “facts and transparency”.
Facts versus lies
WeChat has an estimated 2.9 million Australian users. Australian political parties believe the platform has the potential to affect election results in up to six federal seats, which have high numbers of Chinese-Australian voters.
Researcher Osmond Chiu and Sydney local councillor Kun Huang warn WeChat is a perfect disinformation tool, given its lack of accountability and the fact that conversations on the platform occur in Mandarin.
It also enables users to connect with other WeChat accounts within a 3km radius, allowing the creation of local groups and spreading of information to users not personally known to the person posting information. “This function has played a role in circulating rumours about coronavirus within Chinese communities by allowing the creation of geographically specific group chats,” the pair said.
It is within this context that DFAT, Home Affairs and the Australian Communications and Media Authority are refocusing efforts towards countering propaganda, chiefly on social media. A new special unit has been created within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade — the Countering Foreign Interference Unit — located within the department’s National Security and Intelligence Branch. It will work with like-minded countries across the Indo-Pacific to shine a spotlight on fake news and counter it with facts.
Its aim is to use Australian diplomacy — which has been strengthened through the coronavirus by the nation’s effective pandemic response — to call out disinformation and shame the state actors behind fake news.
DFAT’s submission to an ongoing Senate inquiry into foreign interference through social media says Australia’s message to perpetrators is “their actions can and will be revealed and will generate a meaningful response”.
ANU National Security College senior adviser Katherine Mansted says a strong counter-narrative is a powerful weapon.
“We don’t need to fight lies with lies, or censor disinformation. Even just a simple step of drawing people’s attention to the narratives the Chinese Communist Party puts out, and pointing to the evidence, is really effective.”
The Department of Home Affairs is also flagging “additional responses”, warning the use of social media platforms in Australia “that are extensions of social platforms in authoritarian states” pose a particular problem.
It does not mention specific platforms, but WeChat and TikTok are almost certainly the top two candidates.
Its Senate submission goes on to note: “The manipulation by foreign states of social media during Australia’s electoral processes is a realistic prospect for federal, state and territory elections.
“However, foreign state-sponsored social media campaigns can be conducted at any time in response to geopolitical developments, not just during elections.”
Senior analyst for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Tom Uren says Australia needs to spend less on submarines and more on bolstering cyber defences and weeding out disinformation from strategic rivals, including China.
“Internally, the Chinese Communist Party has always shaped perceptions. That’s what it does — it controls the internal narrative through censorship, and also through controlling state media,” Uren tells The Australian.
“As it has become more and more powerful, and more of a global presence, it sees threats to itself all over the world.”
Uren, a former Defence Department analyst, says the Hong Kong protest movement has been a prime target of China’s fake news factories, because the party sees the relative freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong citizens as a threat to order on the mainland.
“China is also being blamed for COVID-19, so they are reaching out around the globe to try and control these narratives,” Uren says.
Western digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been blighted by “extreme idealism”, Uren says, which has held them back from making tough decisions about removing bad actors from their platforms.
The government has also tasked communications watchdog ACMA with developing a new misinformation and news quality code of practice, in a bid to reduce the impact of fake news.
The voluntary code, which is due to be completed by the end of the year, would make social media giants responsible for misinformation in the same way that most Australian media organisations are bound by self- and co-regulatory requirements for journalistic ethics and accuracy in their news and reporting.
“This is one of the most significant issues facing consumers today,” ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin tells The Australian.
“(The tech giants) should provide greater information to their users about where news is coming from so people can make a judgment about whether or not they want to access that news, or whether they would prefer to go to another source.”
Targeting TikTok
For all the work being done to engage with, and combat, big tech as a platform for propaganda and foreign political interference, it is difficult to predict where the next battleground will emerge.
Like WeChat, TikTok — the hugely popular short video platform — is effectively a black box for Western regulators, offering none of the transparency of its US counterparts. TikTok’s user base has exploded, soaring to more than 800 million active users in just three years. Embraced by teens and twenty-somethings, it allows users to create short videos and is dominated by memes, lip-synched songs and comedy skits. In the US, in the wake of the killing by police of George Floyd, TikTok has also grown to become an influential news sharing platform, documenting the protests and riots across the country.
But the world was given a stark demonstration of its potential power as a tool of disinformation after its Gen Z user base claimed responsibility for the poor turnout at Donald Trump’s political comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma this month.
Teenage TikTok users and Korean pop music fans used the platform to urge followers to register for the rally, but not show up, in posts viewed millions of times.
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted jubilantly that Trump had been “ROCKED by teens on TikTok”. But security analysts have serious concerns about the platform, which already heavily censors content that calls into question China’s human rights policies. What havoc could it wreak to a liberal democracy by manipulating the minds and actions of its teenage users?
It’s a question Australian researchers are already examining, as the Morrison government considers Home Affairs advice on potential new regulatory powers targeting the Chinese platforms.
