Retweeting through the Great Firewall

It way past high time that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks come to realize that they are being massively abused and exploited by totalitarian dictatorships like China to spread disinformation and propaganda!

"This activity largely targeted Chinese-speaking audiences outside of the Chinese mainland (where Twitter is blocked) with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, including the Hong Kong protests, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and, to a lesser extent Covid-19 and Taiwan. ... The main vector of dissemination was through images, many of which contained embedded Chinese-language text. The linguistic traits within the dataset suggest that audiences in Hong Kong were a primary target for this campaign, with the broader Chinese diaspora as a secondary audience. ... 78.5% of the accounts in Twitter’s takedown dataset have no followers at all ..."

"Analysing the dataset as a whole, we found that the posting patterns of tweets mapped cleanly to working hours at Beijing time (despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in mainland China). Posts spiked through 8 a.m.–5 p.m. working hours Monday to Friday and dropped off at weekends. Such a regimented posting pattern clearly suggests coordination and inauthenticity."
Is such stupidity not so very typical for communist regimes?

"There’s evidence that aged accounts—potentially purchased, hacked or stolen—are also a feature of the campaign. Here again, there’s little effort to disguise the incongruous nature of accounts (from Bangladesh, for example) posting propaganda inspired by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."
Some of this is almost comical!

Retweeting through the Great Firewall | Australian Strategic Policy Institute | ASPI A persistent and undeterred threat actor