section_path: Society/Usage/Governments
section_name: Governments
paragraph_text: Governments
  
  According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published in July 2014, the United Kingdom's GCHQ has a tool named BIRDSONG for "automated posting of Twitter updates" and a tool named BIRDSTRIKE for "Twitter monitoring and profile collection".
  
  During the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, Twitter suspended a core group of 1,000 "fake" accounts and an associated network of 200,000 accounts for operating a disinformation campaign that was linked to the Chinese government.
  
  On June 12, 2020, Twitter suspended over 7,000 accounts from Turkey because those accounts were fake profiles, designed to support the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and were managed by a central authority. Turkey's communication director said that the decision was illogical, biased, and politically motivated. Turkey blocked access to Twitter twice, once after voice recordings appeared on Twitter in which Erdoğan ordered his son to stash away millions of dollars and another time for 12 hours in the aftermath of the earthquake of February 2023, when Erdoğan blamed the people for a disinformation campaign as they criticized the Government for their lack of help. In May 2021, Twitter labeled one of the tweets by Sambit Patra, a spokesman of the local ruling party BJP in India, as "manipulated media", leading to Twitter's offices in Delhi and Gurgaon being raided by the local police. Later, the Indian government released a statement in July 2021 claiming Twitter has lost its liability protection concerning user-generated content. This was brought on by Twitter's failure to comply with the new IT rules introduced in 2021, with a filing stating that the company failed to appoint executives to govern user content on the platform. In 2025, Twitter sued the Indian government for using the IT Act to block tweets and other content on its platform.
  
  According to a report by Reuters, the United States ran a propaganda campaign to spread disinformation about the Sinovac Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, including using fake social media accounts on Twitter to spread the disinformation that the Sinovac vaccine contained pork-derived ingredients and was therefore haram under Islamic law. The campaign primarily targeted people in the Philippines and used a social media hashtag for "China is the virus" in Tagalog.