Paid Chinese Porn Bots Flood Twitter In Attempt To Hide News Of Mass Protests Against Xi Jinping

Chinese citizens are taking to the streets to protest the country’s “zero-covid” policy and President Xi Jinping’s lockdowns.
As many Twitter users saw yesterday, the CCP has been welding apartment exits shut. Trapping desperate Chinese families inside.
After a fire broke out in an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, where at least 10 died because they were unable to escape, public anger reached its peak. And the rest of the world began taking notice.
In an attempt to downplay the protests, government censors scrubbed the internet of videos and messages supporting any party dissent. Then they flooded Twitter with Chinese bots to hide the news of mass protests.
Now, searches for the names of major Chinese cities have resulted in a massive spike in content for porn, escorts, and gambling.
Chinese bots swamp Twitter with porn to hide news of mass protests https://t.co/BIvc2eTiPd pic.twitter.com/teQlFHRp8c
— New York Post (@nypost) November 28, 2022
This sort of censorship tactic is known as the “Wumao Army,” which is a group of state-backed internet commenters who the CCP pays 50 cents to post government propaganda.
Though evidence of this “army” is somewhat shoddy, Twitter user Air-Moving Device documented how this strategy works in the lengthy tweet thread below:
I searched for 北京 (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
This is also true when I search for 上海 (Shanghai).
Note that these are just a small sample of the search results — go and search 北京/上海 and you'll see new spam tweets come up every few seconds. So the number of spam accounts is way larger than a few hundred. pic.twitter.com/FhtX6N2mZV
— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
This has been a quick and dirty analysis, feedback/questions highly welcome!
— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
Though the evidence from Air-Moving Device was admittingly spotty and rushed, internet sleuths followed along with the account’s thesis to learn more about some of the Chinese accounts that were sharing the NSFW content flooding city hashtags.
For example, Mengyu Dong of Stanford University noted that some of these Twitter accounts had been dormant for “years,” only to start posting again on November 26 after protests broke out.
This account @amyyoung0425 joined Twitter in November 2015, but all of its 2000+ tweets were sent within the last 15 hours. There are MANY accounts like this.
— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 27, 2022
AND suddenly posted 3000+ nsfw tweets in ONE day. pic.twitter.com/dYUxQFNhtq
— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 27, 2022
unless twitter does something about this. will you? @Twitter
— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 27, 2022
@washingtonpost @josephmenn : Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”https://t.co/BNHBB5NCGk
— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 28, 2022
As Dong mentioned, Chinese people who want to learn more about the protests after the Urumqi fire are in the dark.
Instead of seeing calls for President Xi’s resignation and an end to the China’s “zero-covid” policies, they will be met with pornographic and other unrelated content.
Even The Washington Post reports that this is a known problem. And Twitter acknowledged they are working to address this spike in bot accounts posting unrelated content in an attempt to drown out the truth.
This is what the CCP doesn’t want you to see:
Hundreds of protesters in Beijing march with blank paper as part of the White Paper Revolution
They are chanting "We don't want testing, we want freedom" pic.twitter.com/vIiaRK9uX5
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 28, 2022
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