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China Using 'The Great Wall of Porn' to Obscure Protest News

According to a data researcher focusing on China, there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of tweets related to this topic during the past three days.

Photo by John Feng / Unsplash

If you search on Twitter for any large city in China, you will get an onslaught of spam tweets advertising adult entertainment, escort services, and casino material. These tweets are released every few seconds, rendering it impossible to find reliable results.

According to a data researcher focusing on China (1), there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of tweets related to this topic during the past three days. The increase in such bot content has occurred simultaneously with unprecedented protests that have spread throughout major cities in China and universities during the weekend.

The Chinese government's stance of zero tolerance for COVID-19 is partly to blame for the protests, which represent an unusual display of disobedience on the part of the people.

Why Are the Chinese Protesting?

Because of the severe COVID restrictions, several areas of the country have been under lockdown for an extended period, disrupting daily living and commercial and industrial operations.

Protests broke out the week before last at Apple's largest iPhone manufacturer in China. Employees were upset over delayed bonuses, and concerns about COVID were spreading.

On Chinese social media, any discussion of the recent statewide protests is subject to stringent censorship; as a result, protesters have resorted to using foreign platforms, such as Twitter and Telegram, for communication.

Access to any of the main Western social networks is impossible in China without using a virtual private network (VPN), which is practically impossible to find in the country's app stores.

The content posted by bots on Twitter, which is believed to have connections to the Chinese government, makes it much more difficult for Chinese civilians to organize protests. Elon Musk has unexpectedly terminated the jobs of Twitter's anti-propaganda employees as part of his large layoff plan.

In 2019, Twitter shut down over one thousand accounts that it decided were part of a state-directed operation to undermine protests in Hong Kong. This is a striking contrast to what happened in 2019 when Twitter took such action.

On the social media platform, Chinese-language location-based escort advertising has existed for quite some time; nevertheless, the regularity with which they have been masking searches of Chinese cities in recent days is uncommon, as the data analyst pointed out:

According to a report published by The Washington Post on Sunday evening, Twitter "was aware" of the spam problem and "was attempting to remedy it."

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