China's pornographic ads exploded on Twitter, aiming to hide large-scale protest demonstrations from overseas eyes

by Paul Mozur Meng Jianguo

In China, unprecedented large-scale demonstrations demanding the resignation of President Xi Jinping have occurred across China due to criticism of the failure of the zero- corona policy . It has been pointed out that if you search for such a Chinese city name on Twitter, pornographic advertisements will be displayed instead of protest information.

Twitter grapples with Chinese spam obscuring news of protests - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter-china-spam-protests/

Spam ads have increased dramatically on Twitter since late November 2022, and it has begun to be reported that it is becoming difficult to collect information about protest demonstrations occurring throughout China. Many of the spam ads are accompanied by sexually explicit images and are tagged with Chinese city names such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Twitter is being flooded with spam posts that make it harder to discover content about the protests breaking out across China. The posts, many of which are sexually explicit, use hashtags referring to Shanghai and other Chinese cities.

A slightly more SFW selection ???????? pic.twitter.com/BGlr9mh35H

— Rebecca Choong Wilkins 钟美琪 (@RChoongWilkins) November 28, 2022

An analysis of the tweets revealed that many of the accounts posting these spam ads had been dormant for a long time and began actively mass posting just as the protests in China began to take hold.

I searched for Beijing (Beijing) today (11/28 ~5am Beijing time) and identified accounts with tweets that show up in the 'Latest' search results.
Vast majority (>95%) of these are spam accounts. They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.pic.twitter.com/bOCzc9EagD

— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022

Since most Chinese do not have access to Twitter, these spam ads are not intended to defuse domestic protests, but to hide the protests taking place in China from abroad. It is pointed out .

Earlier today was interesting to see Chinese foreign information campaigns springing into action. Even on Twitter they were doing their best to censor. Spamming #乌鲁木齐with porn to water down tweets about the protests spreading across China.pic.twitter.com/24xsbwWlWV

— Paul Mozur Meng Jianguo (@paulmozur) November 26, 2022

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, has laid off half of Twitter's 7,500 employees and said another 1,200 left after he asked them to 'embrace or leave a hardcore workplace.' It is As a result, Twitter does not have the staff to manually delete spam, and it has not been able to respond sufficiently.

A former Twitter employee who recently left the company testified to The Washington Post, 'All the people in charge of influence operations and analysts in China have left.'

Meanwhile, an active Twitter spokesperson commented, 'We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it.' According to The Washington Post, the problem of pornographic advertisements was certainly improved around the night of November 27, and it became possible to find news and images about protests from search results.

However, pornographic advertisements are still being posted, and a Chinese expert who was interviewed on condition of anonymity said, ``Search results are 50% pornography and 50% protest patterns. Let's see what was just posted today. If you scroll through the feed 3-4 times, it will be all porn,' he said, pointing out that the cat-and-mouse game continues.