Twitter News: Twitter has a spam and porn ‘problem’ related to China, here’s why | – Times of India

Protests erupted recently in China’s ‘iPhone city’ after workers claimed that they were being forced to stay in the Foxconn factory amid the Covid-19 spread. The country imposed curbs to achieve Zero Covid amid a rising number of cases, prompting a wave of protests in other parts of the country.
While on one hand, people protest to oppose the strict Covid policing in China, on the other Twitter has been hit by spam tweets. As per a report by The Washington Post, when you search for major Chinese cities, results will show tweets about escort services, porn and gambling. The content essentially obscures legitimate reports about a wave of protests in the country.
If you search for “北京” (Beijing) or “上海” (Shanghai) on Twitter, you will notice that these spam tweets outnumber those with information about the protests. It is to be noted that when we searched Chinese cities by typing in “Beijing” and “Shanghai”, Twitter returned legitimate tweets containing news, videos and photos of protests erupting in the country.

China protests: Data analysis on Twitter
Alex Stamos from Stanford Internet Observatory shared a post on Twitter that has a thread, which claims that a majority (over 95%) of accounts posting such tweets are spam accounts. “They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation. Interestingly, more than 70% of these spam accounts only started tweeting like crazy recently. The rest (~top 90 in this plot) seem to have been spamming consistently for a while,” the tweets said.
TechCrunch reports that the “bot content on Twitter is thought to be government-connected and is making it harder for Chinese citizens to organise demonstrations.”
What Elon Musk has to say
Musk took to Twitter saying that “the amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous!”. He did not mention the specifics of the China protests but joked that “at least with new Verified they will pay $8 for the privilege.”