Virtual WPS warfare on X
A coordinated network of bot accounts has bombarded X (formerly Twitter) with nearly a thousand posts framing Vietnam as the main threat in the South China Sea, with many of the accounts also spreading pro-Duterte narratives.
The artificially generated activity was said to have been made up of 71 bot accounts, most of which do not have any followers, generating almost 1,000 identical or similarly worded messages between November 2024 and June 2025, often in tightly timed bursts.
The messages were frequently posted within minutes of each other, with a repeated pattern of having nearly identical phrases and using the same formatting — such as the unusual use of tabs instead of spaces. This is a telltale sign of copy-paste automation.
These throwaway accounts are used to turn over recycled outputs that attack Vietnam for its “destructive” island-building activities in the South China Sea, with a subset of the network echoing familiar pro-Duterte and anti-Marcos talking points aimed at Philippine audiences.
A couple of the accounts flagged appeared to have been created solely for the purpose of spreading the narrative that Vietnam, and not China, was the most active aggressor in the South China Sea.
Most of these accounts had no followers or original posts. Many people also use AI-generated profile photos or avatars, which are classic markers of inauthentic behavior online.
According to the data analyzed by the India-based tech forensics firm Thinkfi, which captured the full scale of the influence operation, a large number of bot accounts were posting identical messages within seconds or minutes of each other.
Thinkfi collected over 3,000 posts dating from November 2024 to June 2025. The Philippine Star then parsed the data and isolated nearly 1,000 posts by bot accounts that recycled the same anti-Vietnam scripts accusing Hanoi of harming the environment in the South China Sea and impoverishing its people with its military spending.
Common talking points included accusations that Vietnam’s land reclamation was destroying the marine environment in the South China Sea’s resource-rich waters that several Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines and Vietnam have competing claims to.
Several scripts appeared more than a dozen times, such as the following: “Vietnam has been continuously reclaiming land, which shows how severe the exploitation of the people is,” and “Vietnam’s military expansion and provocative actions [...] undermine regional peace and stability,” among others.
The posts disproportionately focused on Vietnam’s land reclamation activities while completely ignoring China’s vastly larger island-building operations in the disputed waters.