Twitter hit with Chinese spam to obscure anti-COVID protests

We’re in week five of Twitter ownership by Elon Musk, and it’s been a bit chaotic. There have been mass defections to the infosec.exchange Mastodon server if you’re part of the infosec social crew, and now Twitter has been overrun with porn and escort advertisement spam when users search for Chinese cities.

This is the latest attempt by China to spread misinformation and dilute search results so the world can’t see the mass protests across China against COVID restrictions and President Xi.

Indeed, a significant increase in spam for escorts, porn and gambling were rampant days ago at the height of Chinese protests.

Tweets connected to “Beijing” were found to be as high as 95% spam, according to CyberNews.

Interestingly, tech and censorship analyst Mengyu Dong found that “some of these accounts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China.”

This reinforces the notion that China has a permanent foothold across social media platforms and will wait for opportune times to deploy a misinformation or spam campaign.

Chinese bots flooding Twitter

“Chinese bots are flooding Twitter with escort ads, possibly to make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests,” said Dong.

While a few tweets would surely be an annoyance, instead it was an absolute takeover of Chinese topical tweets. The result was anyone searching for posts from those cities and using Chinese names for locations would see endless tweets of spam instead of info or videos of anti-COVID or anti-CCP tweets.

While Twitter has some automated mechanism for responding to situations like this, a recently departed Twitter employee told The Washington Post that this was largely a “manual process.”

This further complicates the reality of a new Twitter ownership under Musk, who recently slashed the headcount from 7,500 to under 2,500.

“All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned,” the ex-Twitter employee said.