Sex bots and spam tweets are said to overshadow protests

Twitter in China faced a spam wave on Sunday. While there were protests in some cities against the ongoing corona restrictions, bots flooded the short message service with prono content. It is believed that this was to suppress information about the protests.

After the wave of layoffs at Twitter, the moderation of spam content has also suffered greatly. This was also felt by Twitter users in China on Sunday.

What was going on on Twitter in China on Sunday?

In China, there are repeated protests against the ongoing corona restrictions. The Twitter platform is often the only way to get reliable information about these protests.

Protests broke out again in several Chinese cities on Sunday. But this time, many users found it difficult to find out about the short message service.

Because, as the data journalist Mengyu Dong writes in a tweet, Chinese bots “have Twitter with them escort ads“ flooded. He assumes that this should make it more difficult for “Chinese users to access information about the mass protests”.

Chinese bots are flooding Twitter with *escort ads*, possibly to make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests. Some of these acts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China. for example: pic.twitter.com/QRYLQu09Pq

— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 27, 2022

Which accounts are behind the spam?

The tweets not only contained spam content, but also the names of the cities in which mass protests had taken place. So if users searched for these cities on Twitter, they mainly came across masses of spam tweets with escort ads or porn content.

According to Dong, some of the accounts behind it had been registered with Twitter for months or even years, but had been inactive for a long time. On Sunday they then literally flooded the network.

Does Twitter lack content moderators?

This isn’t the first time this has happened, according to a recently retired Twitter contributor. reports the Washington Post. “Suspected government-affiliated accounts” have used this technique before.

However, in the past it has been used to discredit an individual account or small group by naming them in companion ads.

According to the ex-employee, this is a known problem on Twitter. However, “all China influence operations and analysts on Twitter” have quit. The incident on Sunday is therefore “another example of the fact that there are now even bigger holes to fill”.

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