Twitter in China flooded with explicit content to drown out lockdown protests news
By MYBRANDBOOK
In order to distract users from news about the ongoing protests against the country's harsh Covid lockdown measures, Chinese bots have swamped Twitter with explicit content.
According to China data analyst account, AirMovingDevice, users searching for any of the major cities affected by this weekend's demonstrations will "mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results".
By sharing a series of charts, the account said, “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.”
This data was then retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos.
More than 95 per cent of the posts are uploaded at a "high, steady rate throughout the day", which is an indicator that they're being posted by spam bot accounts.
The escort adverts have made it "more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests". According to a source, many of the accounts have not been used for years, but suddenly they have sprung to life "after protests broke out in China". One of the accounts that had been set up seven years ago had posted more than 2,000 NSFW texts in the past 15 hours.
While Twitter remains jammed by the lewd content, Chinese state media continues to not report on the protests growing in a number of cities across the country. Such a scale has not been seen since the Red Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Demonstrations have continued in Beijing and Shanghai as police launched a crackdown following a weekend of dissent in a number of major cities. The latest wave of anger was triggered by an apartment fire that killed 10 people on Thursday in Urumqi, a far western city where some people had been locked down for as long as 100 days, fuelling speculation that COVID lockdown measures may have impeded residents' escape.
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