On Sunday, Nov. 27, adult content flooded Twitter for hours, which analysts believe was done on purpose to obfuscate news of significant protests in China.
The spam campaign, according to experts, is an attempt to stop people from reading about rallies taking place against the government’s strict Zero Covid lockdown policy.
China Spreads Spam Tweets
Over the weekend, protesters staged huge marches in several Chinese cities, including the packed Shangai and Beijing. Huge protests were held, the likes of which had not been seen in the country since Tiananmen Square’s student-led pro-democracy uprising in 1989.
Instead of reliable information on the protests over the weekend, Twitter users looking for updates from specific Chinese locations were deluged with hundreds of spam tweets.
Chinese bots are flooding Twitter with escort ads, tweeted Mengyu Dong, a tech and censorship specialist. This may be done to make it harder for Chinese users to obtain information on the major protests.
Researchers discovered that some accounts that had been inactive on the site for years suddenly became active and started tweeting again after the demonstrations.
Twitter appears to have been unable to control the flood of spam containing pornographic material that flooded the site as a result of corporate-wide cuts that reduced the number of employees by more than half.
An anonymous former Twitter employee revealed that this is a known issue that their personnel was addressing manually in addition to the automation methods in place.
Twitter’s workforce was slashed from 7,500 to around 2,000 as a result of the layoffs earlier this month. The company’s machine learning ethics and human rights teams were impacted by this downsizing.
To handle security concerns and covert foreign influence activities on the platform, there are now either no employees working there or very few contract workers. The analysts and China influence operations teams at Twitter, according to the former employee, all left.
READ MORE: Importance of Bats in Developing Medicine That Will Help Humans Fight Different Kinds of Viruses
China’s Zero-COVID Policy
Demonstrations broke out in cities around China as the Zero COVID policy, which essentially imprisons the populace in their homes, began its fourth year.
Many demonstrators demanded President Xi Jinping’s ouster as well as the end of the Communist Party’s 73-year rule in China. BBC cameraman who was covering the chaos was attacked and detained, as per The Independent, by police in Shanghai.
The incident involving reporter Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering protests in Shanghai, has drawn the utmost concern from the BBC.
Additionally, the news source stated that they had not received any formal justification or apology from the Chinese government. The police who eventually freed him claimed they had held him for his own protection in case he obtained Covid from the mob.
READ MORE: The rise in COVID infections suggests that China may have “reached the point of no return.”
