China Floods Internet with Pornography to Hide COVID Protests
As Beijing continues to adhere to an untenable and cruel “Zero COVID” policy, the people of China are now openly revolting against their government, in one of the most powerful protests in nearly 30 years.
The risk is high: China’s tyrannical leadership has no qualms about throwing protesters in the slammer, or worse, for speaking out against the government. Furthermore, Beijing has long used a number of subversive means to keep the rest of the world from seeing how their citizens are treated, and to keep their citizens from seeing what they’re missing outside of CCP control.
This week, that plan included lots and lots of internet pornography.
Chinese bots are spamming Twitter with posts primarily of porn and escorts in an attempt to stop the spread of news about massive protests against coronavirus lockdowns across the country. The spam operation is evidence of more problems for Elon Musk, with one former employee stating, “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”
The Washington Post reports that in an apparent bid to stop the spread of news about the massive protests against coronavirus lockdowns in China, Chinese bots are spamming Twitter with sexually explicit posts about porn and escorts.
Searches for major Chinese cities that have experienced mass protests will “mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.” according to the account “Air-Moving Device” that was one of the earlier sources that located the trend.
And then:
Air-Moving Device continued: “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.” The account shared data retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos.
The analysis noted that the “vast majority” of accounts appear to be spam accounts that “tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.” Mengyu Dong of Stanford University shared images of some of the “escort ads,” adding that they “make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests.”
China seemed to have no qualms about how transparent their tactics were, with many of these accounts having been activated from lengthy periods of dormancy only after the protests began.
