Houston, TX – A review of nearly 170,000 tweets shows a Chinese state-affiliated silencing operation possibly targeted Daryl Morey.
A consistent Twitter user, Morey tweeted multiple times a day before his pro-Hong Kong tweet angered the Chinese Communist Party. Morey has not tweeted since.
Researchers did not go so far as to blame China, but the statistics are staggering.
It shows that 22% came from accounts with 0 followers at some point last week and 50% were from accounts with fewer than 13 followers. There were 4,855 total users in all who had never tweeted until they replied to Morey, and 3,677 accounts didn’t exist until his tweet.
From: How One Tweet Turned Pro-China Trolls Against the NBA
A majority of these tweets replied directly to Morey, rather than simply discussing Morey’s tweet. Some even went so far as to use a threatening Chinese acronym – “NMSL.” Nearly 4,700 tweets included the acronym meaning, “your mother is dead.”
Morey attempted to curb the onslaught two days after deleting his October 4th pro-Hong Kong tweet.
In response, pro-Chinese accounts spammed Morey with almost four times the tweets as his original post garnered. The second coordinated attack occurred between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET. It accounted for 18% of the total tweets at Morey.
Everything points to China attempting to control the narrative.
Information Warfare
According to the Wall Street Journal article, it appears China attempted to utilize Morey’s tweet to strike a blow against Hong Kong protestors.
China’s objective in this troll attack was likely to manipulate the conversation about the Hong Kong protests, the Clemson researchers said. Of the accounts targeting Morey tweeting for the first time, a high percentage espoused pro-China, anti-Hong Kong propaganda, which defied the pro-Hong Kong rhetoric found in the majority of accounts they analyzed. That suggests it was a concerted effort to make the discourse appear balanced — even if the organic discussion was lopsided against Beijing’s interests.
From: How One Tweet Turned Pro-China Trolls Against the NBA
China’s communist colors are on full display here. The entire world can look at the body of research around this likely coordinated attack by China and see they are an authoritarian and repressive regime.