Microblogging site Twitter on Thursday suspended at least 1.7 lakh accounts for sharing information that favoured the Chinese government.

As per the experts working with the social media company, these posts were related to the COVID-19 crisis, and Hong Kong protests, CNN reported.

Twitter accused these accounts of spreading misleading narratives which were favourable to the Communist Party of China, thus violating the platform's policy on manipulation.

The company stated that it had identified 23,750 accounts as a "highly engaged core network" involved in tweeting content favourable to China, moreover, another 50,000 accounts that were used to amplify the content, for example, by retweeting content posted by core accounts.  

Most of these suspended accounts tweeted in Chinese languages. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the target of the campaign were Chinese nationals living overseas, so as to increase the party's influence overseas.

The 23,750 accounts collectively tweeted 348,608 times, according to the researchers at Stanford.

Earlier, Twitter introduced a new feature that allowed tweets to be tagged as 'harmfully misleading' by labelling them orange or red. This is Twitter's new way of dealing with fake news or videos.

For the first time, Twitter tagged a tweet from President Donald Trump about mail-in voting as “potentially misleading.”