Communist Chinese government bots are tweeting "sexually explicit posts about porn and escorts" to prevent citizens from getting information on social media about protests on the weekend, the New York Post reported..Demonstrators demanded an end to the country’s zero-COVID-19 policy, including chants dictator Xi Jinping must step down..According to the Twitter account @AirMovingDevice, which says it analyzes "China and the world in data and graphs," a Chinese citizen who searches for Beijing or Shanghai will "mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling drowning out legitimate search results. The “vast majority, more than 95%, appear to be spam accounts that “tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation,” said @AirMovingDevice..Stanford University’s Mengyu Dong shared images of some of the escort ads, which she said, “make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests.”. More Chinese pornMore Chinese porn .“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 accounts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China,” Dong tweeted..Dong said one account started seven years ago was found to have sent all of its more than 2,000 texts within the last 15 hours..“Another had only posted four tweets and suddenly posted 3000+ nsfw (not suitable for work) tweets in one day,” she wrote. “Sadly, if a Chinese person decides to come to Twitter to find out what happened in China, these nsfw posts shared by bots are likely the first to show up in their search results.”.The New York Post quoted retired US diplomat David Cowhig questioning whether it was proof “Chinese net censors” were “posting great numbers of sexy photos to distract people from Wuhan protests” or “just to jam the channel?”.An ex-Twitter staffer told the Washington Post the use of spam to stop the spread of damaging information is a “known problem” within Twitter..“All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned,” the ex-Twitter staffer told the DC paper..Chinese state media ignored the protests, which have been unprecedented since the army crushed the student-led pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989..The protests started after anger at China’s restrictive zero-COVID 19 policy, which was blamed for killing at least 10 people in an apartment building in the city of Urumqi, where some residents have been locked in their homes for four months. .Chinese social media lit up with charges the city’s lockdown made rescues and escapes harder and people took to the streets across the country, including Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, where COVID first emerged nearly three years ago..On Sunday in Shanghai, some protesters briefly chanted anti-Xi slogans, almost unheard of in a country where Xi has a level of power unseen since Mao Zedong’s era..“Need human rights, need freedom,” chanted hundreds of protesters Saturday night in Shanghai, along with “Don’t want Covid test, want freedom!” and “Don’t want dictatorship, want democracy!”.Pepper spray was used by the police to drive away demonstrators, and dozens were detained in police sweeps and taken away in police vans and buses. China’s internal security apparatus is known for identifying people it considers troublemakers and picking them up later when few are watching..The New York Post's editorial board wrote, “The cries for the resignation of Xi and the end of the Communist Party that has ruled China for 73 years could be deemed sedition, which is punishable by prison.”.In Shanghai and Beijing, the two biggest cities which saw the most fervent protests, police were out in force to make sure crowds could not gather Monday and again on Tuesday..“It’s really scary,” said Beijing resident Philip Qin, 22, as images also showed apparently violent arrests during the protests.
Communist Chinese government bots are tweeting "sexually explicit posts about porn and escorts" to prevent citizens from getting information on social media about protests on the weekend, the New York Post reported..Demonstrators demanded an end to the country’s zero-COVID-19 policy, including chants dictator Xi Jinping must step down..According to the Twitter account @AirMovingDevice, which says it analyzes "China and the world in data and graphs," a Chinese citizen who searches for Beijing or Shanghai will "mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling drowning out legitimate search results. The “vast majority, more than 95%, appear to be spam accounts that “tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation,” said @AirMovingDevice..Stanford University’s Mengyu Dong shared images of some of the escort ads, which she said, “make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests.”. More Chinese pornMore Chinese porn .“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 accounts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China,” Dong tweeted..Dong said one account started seven years ago was found to have sent all of its more than 2,000 texts within the last 15 hours..“Another had only posted four tweets and suddenly posted 3000+ nsfw (not suitable for work) tweets in one day,” she wrote. “Sadly, if a Chinese person decides to come to Twitter to find out what happened in China, these nsfw posts shared by bots are likely the first to show up in their search results.”.The New York Post quoted retired US diplomat David Cowhig questioning whether it was proof “Chinese net censors” were “posting great numbers of sexy photos to distract people from Wuhan protests” or “just to jam the channel?”.An ex-Twitter staffer told the Washington Post the use of spam to stop the spread of damaging information is a “known problem” within Twitter..“All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned,” the ex-Twitter staffer told the DC paper..Chinese state media ignored the protests, which have been unprecedented since the army crushed the student-led pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989..The protests started after anger at China’s restrictive zero-COVID 19 policy, which was blamed for killing at least 10 people in an apartment building in the city of Urumqi, where some residents have been locked in their homes for four months. .Chinese social media lit up with charges the city’s lockdown made rescues and escapes harder and people took to the streets across the country, including Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, where COVID first emerged nearly three years ago..On Sunday in Shanghai, some protesters briefly chanted anti-Xi slogans, almost unheard of in a country where Xi has a level of power unseen since Mao Zedong’s era..“Need human rights, need freedom,” chanted hundreds of protesters Saturday night in Shanghai, along with “Don’t want Covid test, want freedom!” and “Don’t want dictatorship, want democracy!”.Pepper spray was used by the police to drive away demonstrators, and dozens were detained in police sweeps and taken away in police vans and buses. China’s internal security apparatus is known for identifying people it considers troublemakers and picking them up later when few are watching..The New York Post's editorial board wrote, “The cries for the resignation of Xi and the end of the Communist Party that has ruled China for 73 years could be deemed sedition, which is punishable by prison.”.In Shanghai and Beijing, the two biggest cities which saw the most fervent protests, police were out in force to make sure crowds could not gather Monday and again on Tuesday..“It’s really scary,” said Beijing resident Philip Qin, 22, as images also showed apparently violent arrests during the protests.
