Twitter search results for major Chinese cities have become filled with tweets about escort services, porn, and gambling that are obscuring legitimate reports about a wave of protests that have gripped the country,
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter-china-spam-protests/
One analysis highlighted by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimates that over 95 percent of tweets under the Beijing search term are from spam accounts, with over 70 percent of the accounts only having started tweeting in such volumes recently. New spam tweets are appearing every few seconds from accounts that are tweeting thousands of times per day.
Thread by Mengyu Dong @dong_mengyu
The protests relate to China’s stringent zero-Covid strategy, which has resulted in rolling lockdowns in an attempt to control the spread of the virus.
the policy has been in place for some time, protests erupted after a recent apartment fire killed 10 people and injured nine more. One resident of the building told BBC News that Covid restrictions prevented residents from being able to easily leave the compound affected by the fire.
“Food not Covid tests, Reform not Cultural Revolution, Freedom not lockdown, Votes not leaders, Dignity not lies, Citizens not minions.”
Necessities of life.
he amount of spam, which is reported to be coming from government-linked accounts, makes it harder to find legitimate and useful information about the protests, and also impacts people outside the country who are trying to get on-the-ground information about events. Chinese police are also telling those present in-person at the protests to delete photos of the events from their phones, BBC News reports.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-63779736