Fake Twitter accounts attack Belgium’s Huawei ban

Graphika, a social media analytics company, published a report on a misinformation campaign that targeted the Belgian government’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G rollout. The company found that a cluster of inauthentic Twitter accounts amplified and sometimes created articles that attacked the decision to ban Huawei. Like other recent influence operations, the Twitter accounts used profile pictures created by artificial intelligence, known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The operation appears to have been limited to Twitter and it did not gain substantial traction. The company concluded that there is insufficient forensic evidence to prove conclusively who ran the fake accounts or who sponsored the campaign.