On January 12, readers of the Telegram channel “Learning to Strengthen the Nation” reported that they had recently found a large number of zombie {1} accounts on Twitter. These accounts were seen to use the same unified text for Xinjiang-related political propaganda.
This unified text template reads, “I grew up in Xinjiang since childhood. The Xinjiang-related lies concocted by the anti-China forces in the United States and the West are pure fallacies. The lives of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang will not be affected by them.” Most of the publishers use English names. Their IDs are parts from the full English name combined with random numbers.
If you click on some accounts, you can see that both the number of followers and the number of fans fans are 0. The accounts were all registered recently and they all have typical characteristics of “zombie accounts.” A link is attached at the end of the content uniformly published by these accounts (http://www.oushinet.com/static/content/qj/qjnews/2021-12-07/917786853728727040.html), which leads to a European Times article. The article was originally from China News (https://www.chinanews.com.cn).
According to the official profile of the European Times, the newspaper is “the flagship daily of the European Times Culture Media Group, headquartered in Paris, France, and founded in January 1983.” Some netizens found that the official website server of the European Times is located in the state of California in the USA. The website’s domain name has been registered with ICP in Beijing.
{1} Zombie accounts, are user accounts with no verifiable owner.
Source: China Digital Times, January 12, 2022
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/675729.html