Many governments have employed similar playbooks to sow disinformation since Russia used the tactic to great effect in 20. It was the first time Facebook and Twitter had taken down accounts linked to disinformation from China. Twitter alone said it removed nearly 1,000 accounts. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube said they deleted accounts that had spread disinformation about the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. The use of social media by Chinese government operatives for what American officials and executives call nefarious purposes has drawn heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. to recruit a single target, it’s more efficient to sit behind a computer in China and send out friend requests to thousands of targets using fake profiles.” “Instead of dispatching spies to the U.S. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a government agency that tracks foreign spying and alerts companies to possible infiltration. “We’ve seen China’s intelligence services doing this on a mass scale,” said William R.

China spy agent