Researchers: China seems to be flooding Twitter with porn tweets mentioning places where people are protesting, overwhelming Twitter's reduced moderation team

For hours, links to adult content overwhelmed other posts from cities where dramatic rallies escalated

Washington Post 2022-11-28 Joseph Menn

Context & Ripple Effects

The reported spam campaign extends a familiar pressure on protest communication: during Shanghai’s lockdown outrage, internet-savvy residents had already strained domestic censorship systems, while Chinese users later worked around the Great Firewall to distribute protest footage. The difference here is that discoverability on Twitter—not only publication—became the target.

Later analysis of Chinese-language bot activity that drowned out protest posts supports the researchers’ account of coordinated noise as an information-control tactic. Twitter’s reduced moderation capacity makes the platform’s search and location terms a more exposed choke point.

First-order effects

People searching Twitter for protest updates by city encounter adult-content links ahead of relevant posts, reducing the immediate visibility of footage and eyewitness accounts.
Twitter’s reduced moderation team must divert scarce enforcement capacity toward spam and coordinated posting behavior at the same time protest-related terms are under attack.

Second-order effects

Chinese users attempting to get protest material beyond domestic controls face a second distribution barrier on Twitter, adding spam avoidance to the work of circumventing the Great Firewall and sharing footage.
A successful flood of location-keyword results gives coordinated operators an alternative to deleting posts: they can suppress practical access to them by degrading search and feeds.

Third-order effects

If repeated across platforms and events, content moderation becomes part of the resilience of protest communications, with staffing and anti-spam systems determining whether open networks remain usable during politically sensitive moments.
The pattern points to information control shifting from direct domestic deletion toward disruption of discovery on global platforms, especially where moderation capacity is constrained.

The trend: Political influence operations are increasingly targeting the discoverability of protest information on global social platforms rather than solely trying to remove it.

Discussion

@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you'll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results. Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. https://twitt…
@josephmenn Joseph Menn on x
Just wrote about Chinese accounts spamming city names in a suspected attempt to keep citizens from learning about the historic protests. An outgunned Twitter staff fought back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@manyapan Manya Koetse on x
Happening on Twitter at the moment at a time of unrest/protests taking place in various places across China. When trying to find the latest posts on situations in various places (in Chinese), you get endless streams of nonsense ads preventing quick access to actual information. h…
@rachel_cheung1 Rachel Cheung on x
Drowning out authentic accounts with porn isn't a new tactic, but recent campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” a ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ..…
@ronfilipkowski @ronfilipkowski on x
Throughout the day yesterday, people searching for news on protests in China were bombarded with pages linking to porn and escort sites: “All the China influence ops & analysts at Twitter have all resigned."https://www.washingtonpost.co m/ ...
@jsrailton John Scott-Railton on x
2/ With Musk's unbanning inbound, I look at Chinese protests as a test of how #NewTwitter will handle a foreign information operation. So far? Badly. Other bad actors are surely watching & realizing that the defenders have left the building. This is only the beginning.
@maphumanintent Huntsman on x
Throwing up digital chaff to disrupt emergent/ad-hoc networking of protests, but also to force adaptation that can be tracked and targeted. https://twitter.com/...
@maphumanintent Huntsman on x
Very interesting. Within moments of the below quote tweet going up, I had 14 spam comments. Notifications for this tweet are not showing. https://twitter.com/...
@oknox Olivier Knox on x
hE fiReD eVeryOne And tHe siTE haS NEver beEn beTter https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
@paulmozur @paulmozur on x
Good summary of the spamming we've seen hitting Chinese city names on Twitter as the protests spread. The obvious logic would be to drown out protest posts and make info difficult to find. Diluting negative posts has been a common China info campaign tactic for the past year. htt…
@jamesbazan Jim Bazán on x
“For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.” https://t…
@dominiksteiger Dominik Steiger on x
Search for 上海 (Shanghai) and see what you get. Elon's skeleton crew seems overwhelmed. https://twitter.com/...
@thocpodcast @thocpodcast on x
Operation: Boobie Shield, AKA “The Great Callgirl Wall” https://twitter.com/...
@anthony Anthony DeRosa on x
Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results https://techcrunch.com/...
@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
Great suggestion for a control group Andy! A telling single-parameter metric is the % of spam accounts that have tweeted before 11/25 0:00 Beijing time — Beijing 37%, Shanghai 37%, New York 87%, London 76%. Looks like it's specific to Beijing and Shanghai https://twitter.com/... …
@alexstamos Alex Stamos on x
Still working on our own analysis, but here is some good initial data that points to this being an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China (Twitter being blocked for most PRC citizens): https://twitter.com/...
@alexstamos Alex Stamos on x
Last week, I discussed the risks @elonmusk was taking running with a skeleton crew with @ReedAlbergotti, including no threat intel team: https://www.semafor.com/... Looks like we might have the first major failure to stop gov interference in the Musk era: https://twitter.com/... …
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous! At least with new Verified they will pay $8 for the privilege haha.
@paulmozur @paulmozur on x
Earlier today was interesting to see Chinese foreign information campaigns springing into action. Even on Twitter they were doing their best to censor. Spamming #乌鲁木齐 with porn to water down tweets about the protests spreading across China. https://twitter.com/...
@rchoongwilkins @rchoongwilkins on x
Twitter is being flooded with spam posts that make it harder to discover content about the protests breaking out across China. The posts, many of which are sexually explicit, use hashtags referring to Shanghai and other Chinese cities. A slightly more SFW selection 👇🏽 https://twi…
@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
This is also true when I search for 上海 (Shanghai). Note that these are just a small sample of the search results — go and search 北京/上海 and you'll see new spam tweets come up every few seconds. So the number of spam accounts is way larger than a few hundred. https://twitter.com/..…
@charityw4cti @charityw4cti on x
Similar to what happened during g the bridge protests, this appears to be a coordinated spam campaign with hashtag hijacking (names of Chinese cities where protests are). https://twitter.com/...
@danahoule Dana Houle on x
I wonder if someone in debt to Chinese investors, who's told Taiwan it should be part of China, & who desperately needs cars built in & shipped from China, will do anything about this. https://twitter.com/...
@jbenton Joshua Benton on x
Musk “has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them...leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire” https://www.ft.com/...
@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
Then I looked at the number of tweets by each account over time. Interestingly, more than 70% of these spam accounts only started tweeting like crazy recently. The rest (~top 90 in this plot) seem to have been spamming consistently for a while. https://twitter.com/...
@rats_in_maze @rats_in_maze on x
@MikkelSubaru @AirMovingDevice you need to search in chinese (use 北京上海 instead of beijing shanghai) and click the “latest” tab in search results
@melissajpeltier @melissajpeltier on x
They let him bully them like that? https://twitter.com/...
@a_picazo Alheli Picazo on x
Musk is far more concerned about purported bot activity that poses a threat to the fragile ego of Elon Musk. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@evacide Eva on x
When you fire most of your content moderation teams, it becomes quite difficult to fight bots or for Twitter to be a truthful source of news about an important protest movement. https://twitter.com/...
@frydave David Fry on x
@rats_in_maze ... Endless lists of escort and porn results...
@egocrata @egocrata on x
Well @elonmusk - time to choose: Tesla's biggest market or freedom? https://twitter.com/...
@arawnsley Adam Rawnsley on x
Me, a year ago, yelling to an audience of no one that Twitter is really terrible at and inattentive to cleaning up low-grade China spam accounts and why that's bad https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@kimmasters @kimmasters on x
Who is pulling Elon's strings? https://twitter.com/...
@cwarzel @cwarzel on x
As many predicted, a stripped down Twitter team that's lost a lot of the people with institutional knowledge will face *actual* pressure on non-trivial, international speech and information suppression issues https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@bfriedmandc Brandon Friedman on x
Older politicians and regular not-online people sneered at (or ignored) the many warnings that Twitter falling under the control of a fascist with questionable loyalties would have geopolitical consequences. We're in the early stages of seeing what that will look like. https://tw…
@jamesstevenson James Stevenson on x
And this is why @elonmusk has become such a threat. Large state actors have the power to drown out the voice of the people because of a lack of enforcement https://twitter.com/...
@mattyglesias Matthew Yglesias on x
China is swarming twitter with spam to try to drown out coverage of the protests happening there — a big free speech issue that I hope @elonmusk will address. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@venkatananth Venkat Ananth on x
elon's first big test is coming from china, which, needless to say, will drown out any protest video with a deluge of its own content. https://twitter.com/...
@martinsfp @martinsfp on x
“Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.” https://twitter.com/...
@revhowardarson @revhowardarson on x
i wonder how much money elon's penchant for replying to every neo-nazi on twitter has cost him https://twitter.com/...
@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
I searched for 北京 (Beijing) today (11/28 ~5am Beijing time) and identified accounts with tweets that show up in the “Latest” search results. Vast majority (>95%) of these are spam accounts. They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation. https://twitt…
@aidanpobrien Aidan O'Brien on x
One of the few ways Chinese protesters have managed to show the world what's happening is via Twitter. Now, Chinese state propaganda bots are fighting back. This feels like a situation where Twitter 2.0's content moderation capacities will be pushed to the limit. https://twitter.…
@kemc Kathleen McLaughlin on x
All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter resigned under its new owner, just before China was swept up in historic protests and the site was deliberately flooded with porn and useless tweets intended to drown out real information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ …
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
I wonder what all those laid off and people who quit did at Twitter if the site is still running? 🤔 At least new accounts are up 66% year over year. I'm sure there's no relationship there. 🤷🏾‍♂ ️ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@airmovingdevice @airmovingdevice on x
Data source — Twitter search results: web search, “Latest” panel # of tweets: Twitter API Tweet Counts
@golikehellmachi @golikehellmachi on x
the thing about this is that even if they're still committing to minimums right now, it's budget planning time for FY23 https://twitter.com/...
@josephmenn Joseph Menn on x
If you want to see for yourself, search 北京上海南京郑州兰州
@eefjerammeloo Eva Rammeloo on x
This is now on Wulumuqi (=Urumqi) lu in #Shanghai. People holding up white sheets of paper. 'We don't need to write anything on it. It is a symbol of the revolution of the people', someone says. (Don't manage to send videos.) https://twitter.com/...
@emilyzfeng @emilyzfeng on x
Tsinghua university right now👇🏼 city after city seeing protests small and large against Zero Covid policies and against excesses of Communist Party rule - every hour there seems to be a new one https://twitter.com/...
@newley Newley Purnell on x
A user in Zhejiang posted a photo of a box of A4 white printing paper, along with the caption: “I heard this item was recently sold out. #A4 #white paper #coronavirus #freedom.” https://www.wsj.com/...
@jchengwsj Jonathan Cheng on x
On China's social media platforms, internet police are targeting blank sheets of white paper, rushing to remove images of people holding up the empty pages after protesters made them a symbol of zero-Covid frustration. @lizalinwsj @_KarenHao https://www.wsj.com/...
@ywnreporter Moshe Schwartz on x
Blank pieces of white paper have become the symbol of protests sweeping across China. https://twitter.com/...
@phoebe_kongwy Phoebe Kong on x
Another widely circulated video shows a female student chanting ‘no more oral sex for authorities from now on’. It's reportedly one of the ‘blank paper protests’ among universities in China. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@uyghurspeaker @uyghurspeaker on x
Students of #Tsinghua Uni holding blank papirs and singing International anthem during the demonstration, #Beijing, #China, 27th Nov, 2022 CN students used this anthem as their protest song in #Tiananmen in 1989. Xi's ego will not allow this. Brutal oppressions are coming. https:…
@phoebe_kongwy Phoebe Kong on x
As the number of protesters grows, police cordon some of the areas and warn of possible violation of social distancing rule, meanwhile filming the participants. https://twitter.com/...
@jchengwsj Jonathan Cheng on x
“Internet users showed solidarity by posting blank white squares or photos of themselves holding blank sheets of paper on their WeChat timelines or on Weibo. By Sunday morning, the hashtag ‘white paper exercise’ was blocked on Weibo.” https://www.reuters.com/...
@stephenmcdonell Stephen McDonell on x
You'll notice anti-#ZeroCovid protestors holding blank sheets of paper in #China. This is not only a statement about dissent being silenced here, it's also an up yours to the authorities, as if to say 'Are you going to arrest me for holding a sign saying nothing?". https://twitte…
@palkisu Palki Sharma on x
Record cases, rare protests. What an anti-climax for Xi Jinping! The world failed to punish him for exporting the Wuhan Virus. The Communist Party gave him a third term in office with “unlimited power.” Now the people of China are challenging him with sheets of blank paper.Bravo!
@lukedepulford Luke de Pulford on x
Extraordinary thread. Note the blank pieces of paper. A symbol of defiance against CCP tyranny. Started in Hong Kong (below) now spread throughout China. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@lizalinwsj Liza Lin on x
1/ At 2pm on Monday, this Douyin user put up a video with images of blank white printing paper, with the caption: “I heard this item would be out of stock recently. #A4 #WhitePaper #coronavirus #freedom” — how China tried to censor protest videos. W/@_KarenHao https://twitter.com…
@mbrookerhk Matthew Brooker on x
Blank sheets were also used in Hong Kong protests. Perhaps more people than we realise have always understood that Hong Kong's fight is China's fight https://twitter.com/...
@danaihoward @danaihoward on x
In Hong Kong, CUHK students hand out blank pieces of paper in support of protests in mainland China. Banner is in memory of those who died in the Xinjiang fire on Thursday. https://twitter.com/...
@nycjim Jim Roberts on x
A4 Revolution: Blank pieces of white paper become iconic symbol for protests in China as citizens revolt against COVID lockdowns and government censorship. https://www.bbc.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@thestalwart Joe Weisenthal on x
“By holding up blank sheets of paper, protesters reasoned they couldn't be accused of expressing any messages deemed to be secessionist.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
@reuters @reuters on x
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Video footage shows police in Shanghai carrying away a protester who was holding up a blank whiteboard in protest over China's stringent COVID restrictions https://www.reuters.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@jean_leroux @jean_leroux on x
Confirmation on this is pending, but it appears China has banned A4 paper (?!) after protestors in Shanghai used blank pages to protest. Earlier this year Russian protestors against the invasion also used blank postersn, stating “the people know what its about.” https://twitter.c…
@bbcworld @bbcworld on x
Blank sheets of paper have become an iconic item during China Covid protests Many are now referring to the movement as the “white paper revolution” or the “A4 revolution” Follow latest ⬇️
@sentdefender @sentdefender on x
Due to the Rising Unrest that has been reported within multiple Chinese Cities, the Shanghai Chenguang Stationary Company has announced that beginning tonight the sale of A4 Printer Paper will halted to “maintain National Security/Stability and prevent its use in Illegal Acts”. h…

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