Using social media to form perception is the new battle game concocted by states, we first saw this happening in US with Facebook being manipulated by Russia during the election which resulted in Trump winning the election. But state run operatives have been using social media to create their own narrative for years, and its only now Silicon Valley is waking up to this reality.

Twitter had recently removed 170,000 accounts linked to the Chinese government from its platform, it claimed that China has been using these accounts to push deceptive narrative around the Hong Kong protests and Covid-19. Twitter said the accounts were spreading ” geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party of China and removed for violating its manipulation policies”.

Analyst working on analysing the accounts, said most of the accounts were in Chinese and were praising China in its handling of Covid-19 while tweets were also made using the pandemic to attack US and Hong Kong protesters. Out of the 170,000 accounts, China used 23,000 as core network and the balance 150,000 used to spread the content by retweeting the news. Western media portrayed China as a choke-hold on Hong Kong, stiffing its citizen of the promised freedom, on the coronovirus they claim China withheld information on the dire situation in Wuhan. But its China that needs to be more open to foreign media, refusing entry and a government that does not give any other media interviews will draw these sort of criticism.

Not denying of the accounts, upon realising they had been removed, Chinese officials questioned Twitter’s actions and called out the social platform to be more impartial in its policies. Its Ministry claimed China has been the victim of disinformation with attacks and smear, but no accounts have been removed.

Social media platforms are easily manipulated by powerful entities, states with vast resources could use army of cyber troopers to put out contents in their favour and dislodge real news produced by media outlets. They can also engage specialist firms that develops social strategy that can manipulate nations outcomes using data and creatively curated content. Sounds familiar?