Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, September 22, 2017

Not in our name

Even in the highly regulated and followed Chinese Internet, political fraud is possible.

China’s Communist Youth League says Twitter accounts opened in its name are fake

The Communist Party’s youth wing will ask Twitter to close down all accounts recently opened in its name on the social media platform, saying it did not set them up.

CYL members

“We reserve the right to take any other legal action against [this infringement],” the Communist Youth League of China’s publicity office said in a statement on Wednesday…

At least two accounts claiming to be run by the youth league were set up earlier this month. Tweets from the accounts written in Chinese began appearing last week…

The accounts were discovered by internet users… both of which appeared to be genuine at first.

One of them… has been tweeting news from the youth league’s official Weibo account, China’s version of Twitter, and following the Twitter accounts of mainland state media outlets such as CCTV, People’s Daily and Xinhua.

In recent days it has been flooded with criticism of the Chinese authorities.

The second account… has been tweeting news from Hong Kong and Taiwan, including stories about pro-independence banners at Hong Kong universities…

The government has in recent months tightened internet controls including shutting down virtual private networks that allow people to access these websites as it tries to prevent internet users from viewing content it deems inappropriate…