CONSTANZA HEVIA/AFP via Getty Images
Chinese bot accounts flooded Twitter with pornographic content in a seeming attempt to bury news about the massive protests against President Xi Jinping and the country’s strict lockdowns.
Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos noted on Twitter that data supports this potentially being an “intentional attack.”
“Here is some good initial data that points to this being an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China,” Stamos tweeted in reaction to data analysis showing there was a major uptick in ads for porn, escorts, and gambling when Twitter users searched for Chinese cities like Shanghai over the weekend while protests grew larger.
The Washington Post reported:
Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead
of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.
A former Twitter employee told the outlet that Chinese spam accounts were an issue being tackled “manually” before Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at the company. The former staffer also said most of the staff tasked with dealing with such spam are now gone.
“All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned,” the former employee said.
Researchers, including Stanford’s Mengyu Dong, posted examples of the spamming, highlighting accounts like that suddenly lit up and began posting nonstop, adult-oriented content as anti-government protests grew and grew.
Chinese police are also reportedly ordering people to delete pictures and videos of the anti-lockdown protests. Protests against China’s strict lockdown measures heated up after an apartment fire recently took 10 lives, with many pointing out that the lockdown orders made the situation much worse.