Twitter disrupts a China-based influence campaign ahead of the US midterms, spanning nearly 2,000 accounts; two networks skewed right and another left
Washington Post : Tweets: @josephmenn , @naominixwrites , @dfrlab , @drewharwell , and @maxboot Tweets: Joseph Menn / @josephmenn : As Musk was preparing to take control of Twitter, Chinese and Iranian influence operations aimed at the U.S. midterms. With @NaomiNixWrites and @jeremybmerrill. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Naomi Nix / @naominixwrites : New: A fake Twitter account called Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe was part a larger wave of China-based influence operations that sought to stoke division in American politics in the months before the midterms via me, @jeremybmerrill and @josephmenn https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @dfrlab : With just a week until US #Midterms2022 elections, #Twitter disrupted three China-based operations that were covertly trying to influence the election by amplifying ideologically extreme political views. @GrahamBrookie weighed in: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Drew Harwell / @drewharwell : The Ultra MAGA Hot Babe who tweeted that Obama was an Illuminati lizard to her 26,000 followers was actually a Chinese operative https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Max Boot / @maxboot : Are the @twitter employees who uncovered this Chinese propaganda operation still working there? https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This takedown lands at a fraught moment for Twitter: the platform was already under scrutiny for election integrity after its dedicated 2018 midterm hub surfaced conspiracy theorists and bots within hours of launch. The reporting also arrives just as Elon Musk was preparing to take control of the company, putting its enforcement apparatus in the spotlight.
The operation itself fits a documented pattern: an investigation last year detailed how China's social media propaganda machine runs on private contractors generating content for Facebook and Twitter, and weeks earlier Wired flagged Chinese-language misinformation on WeChat as a possible midterm factor. What distinguishes this wave is the ideological split — two networks posing right-wing, one posing left — designed to stoke division rather than push a single line.
First-order effects
- Nearly 2,000 accounts are suspended days before the midterms, taking offline personas like the 'Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe' account that were positioned to amplify divisive political content to American voters.
- Twitter's trust-and-safety team must now defend these removals into a leadership transition, since Musk was preparing to take control as the disruption was underway.
Second-order effects
- Rivals face the same playbook: Facebook has previously banned comparable Iranian and Russian networks running inauthentic accounts, so coordinated China-Iran targeting now spans multiple platforms and forces each to publish its own takedowns or look exposed.
- Domestic partisan influencers get a new attribution problem — foreign-run right- and left-leaning personas blend into organic feedback loops around Trump-era politics, muddying who is amplifying whom.
Third-order effects
- If contractor-built, ideologically ambidextrous persona farms keep scaling, election-period platform policing shifts from hunting single narratives to detecting manufactured polarization itself — pushing platforms and regulators toward provenance and disclosure rules rather than content-by-content judgment.
The trend: State-backed influence operations are industrializing through private contractors and both-sides persona networks timed to US elections, forcing platforms to police polarization itself rather than any single narrative.