Adult content swamped Twitter for hours on Sunday, Nov. 27, which researchers think was done on purpose to drown out reports of massive demonstrations in China.
Experts believe the spam campaign is an effort to prevent people from reading about ongoing rallies against the government's stringent "Zero Covid" lockdown policy.
Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you'll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. pic.twitter.com/Ao46g2ILzf
Pornographic Spam
As per The Independent's report, protesters took to the streets over the weekend in multiple cities throughout China, including the crowded Shangai and Beijing, with unprecedented rallies.
The demonstrations were huge, similar to what has not been seen in the nation since the student-led pro-democracy movement centered on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Over the weekend, Twitter users seeking updates from certain Chinese towns were inundated with hundreds of spam tweets rather than authentic reports on the protests.
Tech and censorship expert Mengyu Dong tweeted, "Chinese bots are flooding Twitter with *escort ads*, possibly to make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests."
Following the demonstrations, researchers noticed that certain accounts that had been inactive on the site for years suddenly became active and began tweeting again.
"Sadly, if a Chinese person decides to come to Twitter to find out what happened in China last night, these nsfw [not suitable for work] posts shared by bots are likely the first to show up in their search results," said Dong.
Layoffs' Impact
As a result of company-wide cutbacks that decreased the staff by more than half, Twitter apparently failed to manage the deluge of pornographic material spam throughout the platform.
Under the condition of anonymity, a former employee of Twitter disclosed to The Washington Post that this is a known issue that their staff was working with manually, apart from automation systems that are put in place.
As part of the layoffs earlier this month, Twitter reduced its personnel from 7,500 to about 2,000 employees. This reduction affected the company's human rights and machine learning ethics departments.
There are now either no employees or just a small number of contract workers addressing security issues and covert foreign influence efforts on the platform.
According to the former employee, the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all quit.
Public Demonstrations
As China's "Zero COVID" policy of virtual house imprisonment for the public entered its fourth year, demonstrations erupted in cities around the country.
Many protestors were calling for the end of the Communist Party's 73-year reign in China, which includes the removal of President Xi Jinping.
The Independent reported that the police in Shanghai also attacked and arrested a BBC cameraman documenting the commotion.
The BBC has expressed extreme concern about what happened to reporter Ed Lawrence, who was seized and handcuffed while reporting demonstrations in Shanghai.
The news outlet also noted that they had received no official explanation or apology from the Chinese government.
The officers who eventually freed him said they had detained him for his own good in case he got Covid from the mob.
Also Read: China's iPhone City Under Five-Day Lockdown, Enters Critical Phase for COVID-19 Cases
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Trisha Kae Andrada
