Govt bot offensive? Twitter searches on China Covid protests return porn and spam

In what is being seeing as a deliberate attempt by China to prevent people from accessing information about the Covid protests, Twitter searches for the uprising are throwing up pornography, spam and even gibberish. Images of scantily clad women in suggestive poses and random word- and sentence fragments were being returned when a search was conducted for the protests in Chinese.

This has been happening since last week when people searched for protests at major hotspots, including in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Guangzhou. Experts say that this has been the case for most major issues in China at the moment.

Also Read |Police force takes over the streets of China to prevent Covid demonstrations

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“It is happening not just around Xinjiang but around any sensitive Chinese issue at the moment,” Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous co-founder of GreatFire.org, a digital activism group based in China, told CNN. “Search any city that has seen a rise in Covid cases, or had on-the-street protests on the weekend, and you will see the same thing.”

Smith also noted that a flood of “dating” spam tweets were appearing on Friday tagged with “Urumqi,” the capital of Xinjiang. Since China came down hard on pornography and other similar sites years ago when it began to censor the internet, the spam tweets advertising sex services don't seem to be the work of random, private individuals.

China has been witnessing unprecedented protests against the country's Covid policies, with people coming out onto the streets. The apartment fire in Urumqi that killed 10 people, is what sparked the protests.

Disinformation amidst China protests are the first big test for Twitter ever since Elon Musk took hold of the reins. Most of these account are bot accounts that were made months back, have no followers and follow almost no one.

Musk has vowed to work to remove bots and spammers from the platform, something he has had a problem with since the beginning. However, now that he has cut half the workforce, including those responsible for maintaining security, disinformation and content moderation have become a matter of concern.

US lawmakers fear that Twitter is vulnerable to being exploited by certain forces. Musk is also linked to China through his electric-vehicle company Tesla and lawmakers have been unsure about his willingness to stand up to the Chinese government. Meanwhile, Musk has said that as far as he knows, China does not interfere with the US media.

(With inputs from agencies)

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