Chinese bots are spamming Twitter with posts primarily of porn and escorts in an attempt to stop the spread of news about massive protests against coronavirus lockdowns across the country. The spam operation is evidence of more problems for Elon Musk, with one former employee stating, “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”
The Washington Post reports that in an apparent bid to stop the spread of news about the massive protests against coronavirus lockdowns in China, Chinese bots are spamming Twitter with sexually explicit posts about porn and escorts.
Searches for major Chinese cities that have experienced mass protests will “mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.” according to the account “Air-Moving Device” that was one of the earlier sources that located the trend.
Air-Moving Device continued: “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.” The account shared data retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos.
The analysis noted that the “vast majority” of accounts appear to be spam accounts that “tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.” Mengyu Dong of Stanford University shared images of some of the “escort ads,” adding that they “make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests.”
She added: “Some of these acts have been dormant for years, only to become active … after protests broke out in China.”
“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,” Dong wrote.
This is reportedly not the first time that suspected government-linked accounts have used this technique, according to a former Twitter employee who spoke to the Washington Post anonymously.
“This is a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place,” said the former employee. This new campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill [at Twitter],” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”
Read more at the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan