San Francisco (AFP)

Chinese authorities have used nearly a thousand Twitter accounts, and to a lesser extent Facebook pages, to discredit and divide pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, the two social networks said on Monday.

Twitter suspended 936 accounts, "coordinated as part of a state-backed" Chinese operation to "undermine the legitimacy and political positions" of the protesters, says Twitter in a blog post.

"We have identified large sets of accounts that behaved in a coordinated way to amplify the messages about the protests in Hong Kong," said the California group.

Facebook, informed by Twitter, said for its part have deleted, for the same reasons, seven pages, five accounts and three groups of the social network, also "related to individuals associated with the government of Beijing."

Not without irony, Twitter recalls that it is banned from mainland China by the Beijing regime, whose agents had to largely use a VPN (a virtual network to bypass geographical restrictions for example). Others have advanced less hidden by using unlocked IP addresses for the occasion.

In total, Twitter says it has suspended 200,000 accounts before they are actually active on the network.

Facebook - also banned in Mainland China - said that about 15,500 accounts followed one or more of the pages now removed from its platform.

But Twitter and Facebook say nothing about the impact these accounts have had.

This number of propaganda or misinformation accounts led by the Beijing authorities remains relatively limited, as the government has many levers in Hong Kong to influence public opinion and exercises very strict control of information in mainland China itself.

The pro-democracy demonstrations that have been going on for several months now in Hong Kong have sparked the webcast of innumerable rumors, flurry of false information and conspiracy theories supporting one party or the other.

According to Rachel Lao, a lawyer close to pro-democracy protesters, "the Chinese Communist Party is very good at creating confusion among the public in China and denigrating these movements."

- Russia, Iran, Burma ... -

Vladimir Putin's Russia had made much greater efforts over several years in the United States to influence the presidential elections in favor of Donald Trump.

Iran is also routinely pillaged by Twitter and Facebook who accuse Tehran of manipulating hundreds of accounts to get its messages under cover of news sites.

In Burma, the military had made its Facebook accounts a propaganda tool for denying ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority before the network suspended its pages. For good measure, Facebook had also blacklisted rebel groups that, according to the network, called for violence.

Here as in the United States, Facebook was slow to measure the extent of misinformation and to respond to remove the sites incriminated which earned him many recriminations of elected representatives as human rights groups.

The first social network in the world founded by Mark Zuckerberg has since invested a lot of money in artificial intelligence and humans to prevent these problems from happening again with less success with the torrent of information circulated by the few two and a half billion regular Facebook users.

Users themselves can now more easily report content they believe to be disinformation, even if it is still very often criticized networks to take too long to block or delete an account.

Instagram - the social network focused on the image and controlled by Facebook-- announced on August 15 that it would be possible by the end of the month to denounce misinformation in a few clicks. This will make it possible to report a publication and then choose "false information" and thus attract the attention of independent fact-checkers so that they can check it

Instagram posts that have been posted will not be deleted, if they do not violate the network policies, but they will not appear using the "explore" function or by searching using a keyword. sharp.

© 2019 AFP