From The Verge: Twitter search results for major Chinese cities have become filled with tweets about escort services, porn, and gambling that are obscuring legitimate reports about a wave of protests that have gripped the country, Washington Post and TechCrunch are reporting. Searches for “北京” (Beijing) or “上海” (Shanghai) are filled with such spam which, as of this writing, vastly outnumber any tweets about the protests.
One analysis highlighted by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimates that over 95 percent of tweets under the Beijing search term are from spam accounts, with over 70 percent of the accounts only having started tweeting in such volumes recently. New spam tweets are appearing every few seconds from accounts that are tweeting thousands of times per day.
Due to the heavy government censorship of Chinese media, protestors in the country are reportedly turning to VPNs to access Western services like Twitter and Telegram to coordinate their efforts, TechCrunch reports. The amount of spam, which is reported to be coming from government-linked accounts, makes it harder to find legitimate and useful information about the protests, and also impacts people outside the country who are trying to get on-the-ground information about events. Chinese police are also telling those present in-person at the protests to delete photos of the events from their phones, BBC News reports.
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