Both Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. reported Monday that they have removed a number of Chinese government-backed accounts engaging in inauthentic behavior.

In a post Twitter announced that it had taken down a total of 936 accounts originating in the People’s Republic of China. The company said these accounts were “deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong,” attempting to undermine the current protest movement.

“Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation,” said the company. “Specifically, we identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests.”

Twitter is actually banned in China, but the investigation revealed that the accounts either used a VPN or accessed the platform using specific unblocked internet protocol addresses. The banned accounts are said to be part of a bigger network consisting of around 200,000 accounts, although Twitter said most accounts were suspended before they got going.

“Covert, manipulative behaviors have no place on our service — they violate the fundamental principles on which our company is built,” said the company. “As we have said before, it is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease.”

Twitter had before this elicited considerable criticism for allowing ads to surface on the platform paid for by China’s state news media. Some of those sponsored tweets again lambasted the protesters, with one tweet asking for an end to the “blatant violence and for order to be restored.” Now Twitter says it will not allow state-controlled media entities to run ads, but they are still able to use the platform.

On the same day Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher said his company had taken down seven Pages, three Groups and five Facebook accounts that were also involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” whose purpose was to undermine the Hong Kong protest movement.

“The individuals behind this campaign engaged in a number of deceptive tactics, including the use of fake accounts — some of which had been already disabled by our automated systems — to manage Pages posing as news organizations, post in Groups, disseminate their content, and also drive people to off-platform news sites,” said Gleicher.

He added that even though the people behind the deceptive content tried to conceal who they were, his team discovered they were linked to the Chinese government. Facebook provided some examples of those government-backed posts, such as depicting protesters as cockroaches or violent thugs.

Photo: Etan Liam/Flickr