As a series of nationwide anti-COVID lockdown protests roil China this weekend, Twitter users were finding it difficult to search for information on the social media platform due to an explosion in pornographic spam.
While protestors were taking to the streets in Beijing and Shanghai to decry the COVID restrictions and rolling lockdowns, a digital bot army roared into gear on Twitter, with a phalanx of long-dormant Chinese language accounts suddenly tweeting links to escort services and other adult content.
Several prominent China journalists and observers trying to track the spontaneous protest movement on Twitter complained about the deluge of spam pornographic content making it difficult to search for information on particular cities.
Bloomberg‘s Rebecca Choong Wilkins tweeted, “Twitter is being flooded with spam posts that make it harder to discover content about the protests breaking out across China.”
“The posts, many of which are sexually explicit, use hashtags referring to Shanghai and other Chinese cities,” Choong Wilkins added.
Air-Moving Device, a Twitter account that tracks China news, tweeted that possible automated Chinese language spam accounts were inundating Twitter’s latest news function. “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. Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.”
Twitter, along with other international social media services like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, is blocked by Beijing’s internet censors within Mainland China itself, although some Chinese users access the platform via VPNs.
The China protests come at a time when Twitter’s content and moderation teams have been pared back drastically following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the social media giant. An exodus of staff at Twitter has seen the overall headcount drop from roughly 7,500 to 2,000, according to various reports.
“All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned,” an ex-Twitter employee told the Washington Post.
