Chinese bots are allegedly trying to hide protest footage and information on Twitter by simply spamming the site with pornographic tweets. It's hard to tell if there's validity to the claim, however according to the account AirMovingDevice, those who type major cities (in Chinese) into Twitter will only see ads for gambling, porn, and escorts.
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.
— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. pic.twitter.com/Ao46g2ILzf
The protests in question have been spreading throughout China after 'No Covid' policies have been (poorly) enforced. So poorly in fact that a building which was locked down for Covid purposes actually caught fire, killing 10 people.
It's theorized that the Chinese bots are trying to hide content from those people searching for information and protest footage. Some spam content is said to have come from accounts that have been dormant for years.
However, a simple Twitter search in English of cities in China will easily retrieve results including protest videos, photos, and seemingly accurate results.
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