{"id":1754306,"date":"2022-11-28T20:11:33","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T01:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1754306"},"modified":"2022-11-28T20:11:39","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T01:11:39","slug":"pornography-escort-service-advertisement-bots-flood-twitter-feeds-preventing-chinese-citizens-from-accessing-covid-protest-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/pornography-escort-service-advertisement-bots-flood-twitter-feeds-preventing-chinese-citizens-from-accessing-covid-protest-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Pornography, Escort Service Advertisement Bots Flood Twitter Feeds Preventing Chinese Citizens From Accessing COVID Protest News"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">32<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fpornography-escort-service-advertisement-bots-flood-twitter-feeds-preventing-chinese-citizens-from-accessing-covid-protest-news%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1754306&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Search results of current widespread protests opposing oppressive COVID lockdown measures in major cities across <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/topic\/china\">China<\/a> were drowned out last weekend by Chinese bots advertising pornography, escort services, and gambling.<\/p>\n<p>Air-Moving Device, a Twitter account analyzing China through data graphs, showed charts indicating footage of widespread protests in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities were nearly hidden from Chinese citizens to access information about the mass demonstrations.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Thread: Search for Beijing\/Shanghai\/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you&#8217;ll mostly see ads for escorts\/porn\/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.<br \/>Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Ao46g2ILzf\">pic.twitter.com\/Ao46g2ILzf<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AirMovingDevice\/status\/1597034969293271040?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 28, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cData analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets,\u201d the outlet said, sharing data retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory.<\/p>\n<p>Chinese citizens flooded the streets after the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s \u201cZero COVID\u201d policy prevented firefighters from rescuing residents locked inside a burning apartment building in Urumqi, leaving at least ten people dead.<\/p>\n<p>The growing conflict between the government and the Chinese people has accelerated in recent weeks after some cities and provinces endured more than 100 days of severe lockdowns of China\u2019s \u201cZero COVID\u201d policy, despite just 38,000 people testing positive for the coronavirus among a population of over 1.4 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Chinese Communist Party authorities have fenced in residents across the country with limited opportunities to travel while other provinces have implemented such lockdowns for more than three straight months as the nation\u2019s pandemic policies extend into its third year, sparking citizen\u2019s demands for Communist Party authoritarians to resign.<\/p>\n<p>Mengyu Dong, a student data journalist at Stanford University, shared images of some ads, saying some of the accounts \u201chave been dormant for years, only to become active \u2026 after protests broke out in China.\u201d<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">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 acts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China. for example: <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/QRYLQu09Pq\">pic.twitter.com\/QRYLQu09Pq<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/dong_mengyu\/status\/1596749168462401536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 27, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a series of tweets, Dong showed various inactive accounts created as far back as 2015, flooding the social media platform with thousands of tweets within 24 hours.<\/p>\n<p>The Washington Post <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2022\/11\/27\/twitter-china-spam-protests\/\">reports<\/a> that an anonymous U.S. government contractor and China expert said search results showed 50% porn and 50% protests while scrolling for news and images of the protests.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOnce I got three-to-four scrolls into the feed,\u201d it was \u201call porn,\u201d the contractor said.<\/p>\n<p>A former Twitter employee told The Washington Post the platform has used suspected government-connected accounts have used similar techniques in the past.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place,\u201d said the anonymous former employee.<\/p>\n<p>The employee added the mass tweet campaign \u201cwas another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill\u201d after the \u201cChina influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A current anonymous Twitter employee told an outside researcher that the company was aware of the problem.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that the platform experienced slight service \u201cdegradation\u201d on Sunday from an old 3rd party tool used to block accounts with no rate limit, which some users believe may have contributed to the issue.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShould be fixed now,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Twitter experienced slight degradation of service today from an old 3rd party tool used to block accounts that had no rate limit (sigh). Should be fixed now.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1597032623020249088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 28, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2022-11-10\/apple-limits-iphone-file-sharing-tool-used-for-protests-in-china\">reports<\/a> Apple Inc. allegedly limited it\u2019s AirDrop wireless file-sharing feature on iPhones in China to prevent protestors sending documents, images, and videos in their latest iOS version released last week, which caps non-contacts from receiving files at 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dillon Burroughs contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<p><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Search results of current widespread protests opposing oppressive COVID lockdown measures in major cities across China were drowned out last weekend by Chinese bots advertising pornography, escort services, and gambling. Air-Moving Device, a Twitter account analyzing China through data graphs, showed charts indicating footage of widespread protests in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities were nearly &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":429,"featured_media":1754309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1754306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1754306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1754309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1754306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1754306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1754306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}