Chinese bots have swamped Twitter with explicit content to distract from news about the ongoing protests against the country's harsh Covid lockdown measures from spreading.
Users searching for any of the major cities affected by this weekend's demonstrations will "mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results", according to China data analyst account, AirMovingDevice.
Sharing a series of charts, the account said: “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.”
The data was then retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos.
More than 95 per cent of the posts are uploaded at a "high, steady rate throughout the day", which is an indicator that they're being posted by spam bot accounts.
Mangyu Dong, a researcher at Standford University, said the escort adverts have made it "more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests".
She added that many of the accounts have not been used for years, suddenly springing to life "after protests broke out in China".
She pointed to one account that had been set up seven years ago, but posted more than 2,000 NSFW texts in the past 15 hours.
“Sadly if a Chinese person decides to come to Twitter to find out what happened in China last night, these nsfw [not suitable for work] posts shared by bots are likely the first to show up in their search results,” she wrote.
While Twitter remains jammed by the racy content, Chinese state media continues as normal - not reporting on the protests growing in a number of cities across the country.
Image:
VCG via Getty Images)The scale of these protests has not been seen since the Red Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Demonstrations have continued in Beijing and Shanghai as police launched a crackdown following a weekend of dissent in a number of major cities.
The latest wave of anger was triggered by an apartment fire that killed 10 people on Thursday in Urumqi, a far western city where some people had been locked down for as long as 100 days, fuelling speculation that COVID lockdown measures may have impeded residents' escape.
Image:
Getty Images)In Shanghai, a crowd that started gathering late on Saturday to hold a candlelight vigil for the Urumqi victims held up blank sheets of paper, according to witnesses.
Similar sheets of paper could be seen held by people at separate Sunday gatherings on the grounds of Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University and along the Chinese capital's 3rd Ring Road near the Liangma River.
"The white paper represent everything we want to say but cannot say," said Johnny, 26, who took part in one of the Liangma River gatherings.
"I came here to pay respects to the victims of the fire I really hope we can see an end to all of these COVID measures. We want to live a normal life again. We want to have dignity."
