Twitter spam obscures China COVID policy protest news
a surge in bots peddling porn and gambling around these queries just as demonstrations flared in Beijing and other cities over the past three days in response to China's"zero-COVID" policies. The spam is making it harder to track the rallies, particularly for local activists who are using Twitter through a VPN to avoid Chinese government censorship of the protests on domestic social networks.
Twitter has effectively dissolved its communications team and hasn't officially commented on the matter. However,a Twitter employee told a researcher that the company is"working to resolve" the bot problem. It was easier to find word of the protests by late Sunday, but spam was still cluttering results. A former staffer toldthat government-linked Twitter accounts have previously spammed en masse, but usually to attack individual accounts or small groups.
Thread: 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.
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