I've been having a look around at some of the websites identified in @Graphika_NYC's recent report on artificial Twitter amplification linked to Belgium's decision about whether to allow Huawei to participate in their national 5G network.

Thread. https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/1355112295429451780

Specifically, I had a look at dwire[.]eu, identified on p.8 of Graphika's report as one of the domains boosted by the bot network. https://web.archive.org/web/20210206044511/https://dwire.eu/

I found that Dwire shares a Google Adsense ID with 11 other domains, most of which also present themselves as news sites ostensibly based in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland and Portugal, as well as in Belgium.

One domain which immediately catches the eye is huaweiadvisor[.]com.

The Adsense ID is not the only link between Dwire and Huawei Advisor. Both accounts have articles authored by a user with the distinctive name of 'bettye2615'.

While Dwire's Facebook page appears to have been deleted, Google search results suggest that at one time the page may have been named Huawei Advisor.

Huawei Advisor is considerably older than the other sites (as we'll get to in a minute). It was created in 2019 and has been used to publish news and content about Huawei products, including republishing Huawei promotional material.

Important to note that this does not necessarily reflect any direct relationship with Huawei, as this content could have been found anywhere. Similar sites exist for Apple and other tech companies, in some cases run by fans of the products.

It is not obvious who is behind Huawei Advisor. It does not appear to be an official Huawei site, but Huawei Europe does seem to have been aware of it, tweeting a link to an article on the site in 2020 https://archive.is/H9mAp 

So that's Huawei Advisor. What about the other domains?

These sites present themselves as news outlets based in multiple countries besides Belgium: Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. Their content is all in English, however. Some of them have a tech focus, while others seem to pitch themselves as more general news.

Almost all of these sites were registered on December 21st, 2020, although not all with the same hosting providers. They are using Whois privacy protections (this is common and not necessarily suspicious). Here are three as examples.

Based on the dates their logo images were uploaded, the sites appear to have become active over the course of a week or so in late December-early January. Same three sites used as examples.

It is not clear who is behind the sites. Some author accounts have usernames like our friend bettye2615, while others have distinctive names that you'd think would make the authors very easy to find, like "Riofach Mhic Ciaragain", but are hard to find any other trace of.

The content on all of the sites appears to be auto-translations of news articles from some other language. These do not seem to have been checked by a proficient English speaker, who would probably have noticed that it is gobbledegook. Try reading this.

And is it Rethink Ireland, or Reevaluate Ireland? The auto-translate likes to give options, it seems.

However, there is some content on all of the sites which is prominently featured and does not seem to have gone through any sort of tortuous auto-translate, and that is Huawei promotional content.

Again, important to note that this does not necessarily indicate a direct connection with the Huawei company itself. Whoever is behind these sites could have obtained this content in any number of places. It's just an interesting observation.

Another interesting observation: until recently, the sites also featured auto-translated articles relevant to 5G or to Huawei. In a number of cases, these articles have now been deleted, although they remain visible in Google's cache.

It is not clear why this has been done, or whether it was before or after @Graphika_NYC's report came out.

So what do we have here? In my opinion, this looks like a coordinated effort to astro-turf news sites targeting audiences in multiple European countries. I wouldn't consider these 'fake news' as such, in that the content seems to be real news run through (bad) auto-translate.

However, news sites do not need to be 'fake' in order to be deceptive or manipulative, or to present a skewed view on a complex issue.

Given how recently the sites were set up, it's not clear at this stage what their intended purpose is/was.

The connections to Huawei Advisor and to the campaign of amplification uncovered by @Graphika_NYC, and the prominence of Huawei and 5G content on the site suggests that it may have been related to that, but we can't know for sure.

There is no evidence which I have come across that points to a direct link between these sites and Huawei as a company. There are a number of possible explanations for this activity, and we should not jump to conclusions.

Still, it was an interesting rabbit hole to go down! Journos, researchers, if you're interested in using any of this research in your own work, go for it. Please just give credit to where you found it.

This thread brought to you by Melbourne's snap Covid restrictions messing with my Saturday night plans