Twitter flooded with Chinese spam, obscuring protest news

Users who search for major Chinese cities see spam from accounts that appear to be bots

There has been a noticeable increase in spam and suggestive ads on Twitter over the past three days in what seems to be an effort to lessen the flow of news about demonstrations against the Chinese government's coronavirus restrictions in the country.

Analysts said that when they attempted to search any large Chinese city on Twitter, they observed a flood of spam tweets showing porn, escort services and gambling content.

Because of the spam, it has become difficult to track demonstrations, particularly for local activists who access Twitter through a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the Chinese government's censorship of protests on domestic social networks.

The demonstrations mainly intensified after a fatal apartment block fire in Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang.

Critics pointed the blame at the Chinese government's strict lockdown measures for Covid-19, claiming that they caused delays for firemen, thereby contributing to the fatalities.

Some protesters have demanded the resignation of the Communist Party's leadership, including President Xi Jinping.

Chinese social media strictly forbids discussion of such nationwide protests, so demonstrators have resorted to foreign platforms like Twitter and Telegram for communication.

All major Western social networks are blocked in China, and the only way to access them is via a VPN, which is also hard to get in local app stores.

On Twitter, the location-based escort ads in Chinese language are nothing new, but the frequency with which they have been obstructing searches for Chinese cities these days is unusual.

The spam campaign was spotted by researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere.

Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said his team was working to ascertain the scope and effectiveness of the campaign.

Stamos estimated that more than 95% of tweets that appear when you search for "Beijing" are from spam accounts.

Stamos said that he had previously warned about the dangers that Elon Musk was incurring by firing so many of the company's staff, and that this looks to be the first big failure to halt a government interference campaign under Musk's leadership.

Twitter's staff has been reduced via mass layoffs and resignations from around 7,500 to approximately 2,000, according to media reports.

Some groups, such as those that address safety issues, human rights violations, and fraudulent foreign influence activities, have been downsized to only a few members or have no staff at all.

A former Twitter employee told the Washington Post that the new campaign was "another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill."

"The China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned."

The surge in spam also presents questions about Musk's position on bots. He attempted to back out of the purchase of Twitter over claims that the social media platform was concealing the actual number of fake accounts.

Because Twitter isn't as well-prepared to deal with the threat, it seems that spammers and other fake accounts could suddenly be a bigger issue than they were before.