China-backed disinformation campaign on social media has been running for years, researchers claim

In 2017, thousands of tweets targeted a Chinese businessman who publically accused government officials of corruption

Actors linked to the Chinese government have been running a disinformation campaign against political targets for at least two years on various social media platforms.

That's according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC), which claims that the accounts involved in the disinformation operation recently identified by Twitter were active in several earlier disinformation campaigns. Those campaigns targeted political opponents of the government in Beijing.

Recently, those accounts pivoted to target pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, posting misinformation in a bid to undermine the pro-democracy movement. Twitter identified and deleted hundreds of such accounts last month.

In a blog post, Twitter claimed that it had identified several clusters of accounts that were coordinating to order to spread fake images and messages, depicting Hong Kong's protesters as violent. Facebook also removed several pages and groups involved in similar activity. A fake post on Facebook likened the protesters to ISIS fighters.

According to an analysis by ICPC researchers, a sample of approximately 1,000 accounts deleted by Twitter found that some of them had been created more than 10 years ago.

In the case of the Hong Kong protests, tweets from such accounts started to appear in April, mentioning the planned amendments by the government to formally allow extradition from Hong Kong to mainland China.

The activity from such dubious accounts spiked in June when hundreds of thousands of people came on streets in Hong Kong to protest the new extradition bill introduced by the government.

Many of the tweets from those accounts were written in Chinese characters, with a primary purpose to: condemn the pro-democracy protesters; support the police action; and, suggest the involvement of Western governments in the protests.

According to researchers, similar campaigns have been launched in the past targeting Beijing's political opponents.

In one such operation in 2017, thousands of tweets targeted Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman who was exiled from the country after publically accusing government officials of corruption. Tweets against Wengui highlighted his relationship with Steve Bannon, former adviser of Donald Trump, and accused him of treachery against China.

Other similar campaigns in the past targeted a human rights lawyer and a bookseller, who distributed stories about the political elite in the country.

Both Twitter and Facebook currently face increased pressure from governments and the public to take stronger actions against alleged fake content. This follows on from the 2016 US presidential election, when the sites were used by Russian actors to spread inflammatory messages around social issues.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, it was said that his election win was aided by dubious content, largely produced by Russian authorities, on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

To combat fake news and disinformation on the internet, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has also launched a new project, named Semantic Forensics (SemaFor).

Under this project, DARPA will create a custom software system capable of scanning more than 500,000 stories, videos, images and audio files and to identify fakes hidden among them.